Building Organizational Intelligence

A Knowledge Management Primer

Jay Liebowitz

• Editorial: CRC Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000721898
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Commerce
• Categoría: Gestion de l'information

"Sharing knowledge is power." If ever there were a field to which this applies, it is the knowledge management industry. And in today's highly-competitive, fast-paced business world, corporations, businesses and organizations in both the public and private sectors are constantly searching for new cutting-edge methods and techniques for creating, storing, capturing, managing, organizing, distributing, combining, and retrieving knowledge. But the task of accomplishing such functions is not as simple as it sounds. Jay Liebowitz's Building Organizational Intelligence: A Knowledge Management Primer gives executives, managers, systems analysts, and other knowledge-management professionals the competitive edge they need in achieving that task. In a concise and easy-to-read format, the book describes the concepts, techniques, methodologies, and tools associated with those functions, and includes mini-case studies and vignettes of how industry is developing and applying these functions towards building organizational intelligence.What's more, the book is packaged with a limited functionality version of "WisdomBuilder, " the first in a family of knowledge-management tools that provide a fully integrated solution to the information management and analysis dilemma. Able to run under Windows 95, 98 and NT, "WisdomBuilder" solves the information overload problem by reducing the time and cost of extracting information and other research knowledge from disorganized repositories of heterogeneous data.

1	What is Organizational Intelligence?

Most Chief Executive Officers feel that knowledge is the most critical asset of their organization. They believe that their organization’s “brainware”, the intellectual capital of their firm, is what gives the organization their competitive edge. As one CEO from Texas Instruments said, “If we only knew what we know!”

In today’s movement towards knowledge management, organizations are trying to best leverage their knowledge internally in the organization and externally to their customers and stakeholders. They are trying to capitalize on their “organizational intelligence” to maintain their competitive edge.

Companies are realizing that their human capital and structural capital are the distinguishing elements of their organization. Human capital refers to the “people power” and structural capital is databases, patents, intellectual property, and related items that the employee can’t readily take home with them.

Knowledge management is one of the “hottest” terms in organizations today. The thrust of knowledge management is to create a process of valuing the organization’s intangible assets in order to best leverage knowledge internally and externally. Knowledge management, therefore, deals with creating, securing, capturing, coordinating, combining, retrieving, and distributing knowledge. The idea is to create a knowledge sharing environment whereby “sharing knowledge is power” as opposed to the old adage that, simply, “knowledge is power.”

In order to create knowledge management systems, it is critical to build a supportive culture (from top management on down). This was certainly true in the Buckman Labs example of their K’Netix knowledge management system, wherein Bob Buckman (CEO of Buckman Labs) said that 90% of knowledge management and their success was building the culture to encourage knowledge sharing. In a recent benchmarking study of about 150 companies, the reason given by those individuals who didn’t want to share their knowledge was not that they wanted to keep their competitive edge close to heart. Rather, it was that they wouldn’t be able to put their own thumbprint on knowledge if they had to use someone else’s knowledge. This suggests the need for an incentive and reward system to encourage knowledge sharing. Some companies, like Andersen Consulting and Lotus, evaluate their employees for their annual job performance review partly on how well they contribute their knowledge to the organization’s knowledge repositories and how well they use and apply the knowledge that exists in these repositories. Oftentimes, the technology is not the limiting factor in creating a knowledge management environment — it’s the “management” of the technology and “culture” that greatly influences the success of knowledge management endeavors.

The intelligent systems discipline can be applied easily to the knowledge management field. Case-based reasoning, for example, is an effective technology for help-desk applications. Tools exist, like CasePoint by Inference, to facilitate the development of these case-based help desks. Expert systems can also be used to help capture the experience and knowledge of those experts within the organization before they retire or leave. The ELAWS effort in the U.S. Department of Labor is an excellent step in this direction in developing knowledge compliance systems over the web as employment law advisors for workers and small businesses. Data mining may also be an appropriate technology to help determine trends and relationships in data and information. The use of intelligent agents can also be applied for helping better tailor the search and navigation process of important information and documents. Additionally, all these technologies should be designed to conform with proper human–computer interaction guidelines with respect to cognitive overloads, visualization, and user interface considerations.

Modest knowledge management efforts could commence in organizations with a “yellow page” directory of mapping knowledge areas to experts within the organization. A best-practices or lessons-learned knowledge repository could also be created to facilitate knowledge sharing efforts. There should be a knowledge management infrastructure within the organization whose mandate is to identify, analyze, manage, maintain, and disseminate knowledge to appropriate individuals within the organization and externally to others. Many organizations already have created a “Chief Knowledge Officer” position or equivalent to help spearhead these knowledge management efforts. Through web-based and intranet technologies, we now have the “connectivity” to allow the “collection” of knowledge bases to be disseminated more easily than before. This will help contribute towards building an entity’s “organizational intelligence” (OI).

Knowledge Management: Is It So New?

Knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating value from an organization’s intangible assets. Is this concept really new? Not really! It’s an amalgamation of knowledge-based systems, artificial intelligence, software engineering, business process improvement, human resources management, and organizational behavior concepts.

So why the craze? Companies are realizing that their competitive edge is mostly the brainpower or intellectual capital of their employees and management. Many organizations are drowning in information and starving for knowledge. In order to stay ahead of the pack, companies must leverage their knowledge to survive. With web-based and intranet technologies, the connectivity and possible sharing of knowledge are greatly enabled in order to build the knowledge infrastructure of the firm. Knowledge management is believed to be the current savior of organizations, but it is much more than developing Lotus Notes lessons-learned databases. Knowledge management deals with the conceptualization, review, consolidation, and action phases of creating, securing, combining, coordinating, and retrieving knowledge.

So what makes knowledge management so hard? First, the organization must create a knowledge sharing environment. Some firms provide incentives to promote this climate until it becomes the norm. Other organizations require their employees to contribute actively and use knowledge in the organization’s knowledge repositories as part of their annual job performance review.

The second enigma is determining how senior executives can value the knowledge in their organization in order to show some tangible benefits. A number of individuals like Leif Edvinsson, Michael Malone, Karl Sveiby, Tom Stewart, Annie Brooking, Rob van der Spek, and Robert de Hoog, and others have developed methodologies to value knowledge. Some of these techniques value knowledge at the “global” (firm-wide) level, and others value knowledge at the “knowledge item” (lower level). It’s not easy to value the intellectual capital (especially the “human capital”) in the organization. Unless we develop ways to do this, top management may not place much emphasis on knowledge management, and may not stress the importance of intellectual capital in the organization.

A third fly in the ointment is the belief that information management is the same as knowledge management. Knowledge is information with a process applied to it, which may eventually become wisdom or expertise. Many organizations are having their IT (information technology) directors become Chief Knowledge Officers, because top management often feels they are comparable positions. This is a mistake because knowledge management draws from many disciplines, including IT, and it is broader in scope than the technology functions that an IT director often oversees. A new breed of knowledge officers or knowledge analysts is needed to fill the roles of knowledge managers in organizations.

A fourth fallacy that organizations haven’t fully realized is knowledge management works best when the CEO on down actively use the knowledge management systems designed for their organizations. Without senior management commitment and involvement, the knowledge management systems and infrastructure may be pushed aside and not be integrated within the mainstream of the organization. Buckman Labs’ K’Netix (its knowledge management network) was successful largely due to the backing and usage of it by its CEO, Bob Buckman.

The last major concern regarding the survivability of knowledge management is the misnomers being labeled on almost every tool as a “knowledge management” tool. This hype will kill the “good” from knowledge management principles in the same way that the previous fad, BPR (Business Process Reengineering), died out. Many consulting firms are proclaiming their expertise in knowledge management. But the truth of the matter is that knowledge management, as a field, is almost too young for there to be many experts.

Without organizations fully understanding these five major concerns, the fear is that the mystique of knowledge management will remain cloudy and shapeless. With more researchers and practitioners working together to further define and develop the KM field, the mystique of KM will begin to produce an aura of fundamentally sound principles, concepts, methodologies, techniques, and tools. By working together, knowledge management can help build the “organizational intelligence” (OI) of a firm.

Organizational Intelligence

Various definitions have been applied to “organizational intelligence”. Some of these definitions include:

■ the problem of gathering, processing, interpreting, and communicating the technical and political information needed in the decisionmaking process (Wilensky);

■ the organization’s ability to deal with complexity, that is, its ability to capture, share, and extract meaning from marketplace signals (Haeckel and Nolan);

■ that capacity for computation which can be applied to information that is externally gained or internally generated to meet survival challenges (McMaster);

■ information processing functions that permit adaptation to environmental demands and are related to innovation initiation and implementation (Glynn);

■ the intelligent behavior of organizations as a function of their design (Nonaka);

■ the cognitive functioning through which information flows through organizations (Halal and Kull);

■ understanding organizations as learning systems and creative systems (Nevis; Mumford and Gustafson);

■ organizational intelligence is a function of five cognitive subsystems: organizational structure, culture, stakeholder relationships, knowledge management, and strategic processes (Halal et al.).

The author’s view is that organizational intelligence is the collective assemblage of all intelligences that contribute towards building a shared vision, renewal process, and direction for the entity. Specifically, organizational intelligence involves the following knowledge functions:

Transforming information into knowledge involves the synthesis and conversion of useful data and information into knowledge. For example, rules of thumb acquired over years of experience and learning may result in knowledgeable shortcuts to help in the decision-making process. Other types of knowledge (i.e., procedural, declarative, episodic, metaknowledge) need to be identified in the organization and verified as relevant knowledge. Once knowledge is identified, it should be captured or acquired and then secured within the organization. Once captured and secured, it must be organized in a way in which others in the organization can retrieve this knowledge and apply it to their situations. They will also combine this knowledge with knowledge of their own within the context of their situation. This will, hopefully, result in a synergistic way of creating new knowledge for the organization. This knowledge would then be distributed within the organization or to stakeholders and possibly sold. New knowledge would, hopefully, be learned, captured, and secured within the organization, and then the cycle would continue.

Organizational intelligence would be built, adapted, and refined from this cyclical process. Of course, a series of questions result in order to build and leverage an organization’s intellectual capital, as developed by Linkage Inc.:

■ What is your organization doing to build systems that create, capture, and leverage customer knowledge into business opportunities?

■ What systems are in place to capture the tacit knowledge and expertise of employees who are leaving your organization?

■ Do your organization’s reward and/or recognition practices motivate people to collaborate and share knowledge?

■ How much work is duplicated because knowledge, information, and lessons learned are not accessible to all?

■ Is your training and learning strategy aligned with the needs of a knowledge enterprise?

■ Is there an opportunity for you to lead your organization’s knowledge and learning strategy?

■ How do you assess your organization’s learning culture?

An important part of organizational intelligence is the renewal process in fostering organizational learning within the entity. The ability to transform individual learning into organizational learning is a challenge in the organization. Several new organizational forms and metaphors are being used to assist in the learning and knowledge deployment process. One useful technique is through a “Community of Practice”. John Seely Brown, Director of Xerox PARC in 1993, defined “Community of Practice” as:

At the simplest level, they are a small group of people who’ve worked together over a period of time…not a team, not a task force, not necessarily an authorized or identified group…perform the same tasks…or collaborate on a shared task…or work together on a product…They are peers in the execution of “real work”. What holds them together is a common sense of purpose and a real need to know what each other knows.

According to the Institute for Research on Learning, a spin-off of Xerox Corporation, a Comm...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• The Author
• 1 What is Organizational Intelligence?
• 2 Creating Knowledge
• 3 Capturing and Storing Knowledge
• 4 Transforming Individual Learning into Organizational Learning
• 5 Combining, Transferring, and Distributing Knowledge
• 6 Building a Continuous Learning Culture
• 7 Culture: The Key Ingredient
• 8 Developing a Knowledge Management Capability
• 9 Assessing Knowledge Management Through a Knowledge Audit
• 10 Augmenting Organizational Intelligence
• Role and Skills for Knowledge Management — Questionnaire
• Appendix A: The Intelligent Agent-Based Knowledge Management System for Supporting Multimedia Systems Design on the Web
• Appendix B: Audit of Knowledge Management Practices for Innovation
• Appendix C: Knowledge Management: Strategies for the Learning Organization Screening Survey
• Appendix D: Valuating Knowledge Assets (Human Capital) Knowledge Survey
• Index