Description

• Copyright 1999
• Dimensions: 8x10
• Pages: 128
• Edition: 1st

• Book
• ISBN-10: 0-201-43315-X
• ISBN-13: 978-0-201-43315-9

Managing "knowledge" is a new and vital skill for corporations. In the information economy, the organization that knows the most about itself and its business is best positioned for success. But, how do you begin to implement a knowledge management strategy? How can you get started making better use of your organization's data, information, and knowledge?

Managing Knowledge is the first practical guide to applying the theories and reaping the benefits of knowledge management. You will learn tools, techniques, and methodologies to help you:

• Evaluate content in the context of corporate goals
• Determine what information should be included and excluded in a knowledge management implementation
• Create a Web-based knowledge management strategy to support critical business processes
• Find the right people to manage important content
• Facilitate and encourage knowledge sharing

Knowledge management allows you to increase productivity and reduce costs throughout your supply chain by getting the right content to the right people at the right time. With this book, you will learn proven methods for identifying valuable information--corporate intellectual capital--and linking it to business processes before deploying an internal Web, sparing information managers frustration. The authors demonstrate how to begin this challenging task, how to keep it moving forward, and how to overcome cultural, political, and organizational barriers to success.

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Chapter One: Strategy

Beyond Accessibility-from Information Systems to Managing Knowledge As traditionally defined, the CIO is in charge of the technology your company uses to capture, store, and access data. His or her job usually involves developing standards-maybe you've standardized on Unix servers with Oracle databases. It also involves controlling costs-delivering the best solution for the smallest amount of money. Above all, his or her job is to help the company assimilate information technology (IT) to cut costs, achieve competitive advantage, or change the business model. The effect of this assimilation has been a general increase in the volume and accessibility of information. This is inevitable in the sense that it is a natural effect of the information economy-the production of more and more information to support employees, partners, and customers. On the other side of this equation, it has given us InfoSmog-data-induced paralysis. There is simply too much information to take quick and effective actions in the interests of our organizations. As the assimilation of IT continues, the need to extract the kind of information that allows people to take actions that lead to predictable outcomes is becoming paramount. We don't need to reduce the amount of information and data we collect. We need to learn how to translate data and information into knowledge-those general principles that, when applied, yield predictable results. As we've already said, this is not primarily a technology issue, although it involves technology. It is a human capacity that must be judiciously applied. For example, plenty of information exists on the effectiveness of airbags. We can state increased survival rates for adults as facts, and we can collect the data in databases. But knowledge comes in the form of a general principle: young children stand a better chance of surviving accidents if they are placed in the back seat with a seat belt fastened. It's a fairly simple principle that is derived from experience and lab tests. When applied, the outcome should be predictable-an increased rate of survival. Because it is stated simply, it can be packaged and disseminated easily by means of public service announcements, casual conversation, videos, etc. Managing knowledge-as we define it in this book-in the context of business involves capturing and disseminating these principles (along with related data and information) based on job functions. That is, you need to define those job functions that are essential to the realization of your organization's goals and objectives, and you must figure out the knowledge they need to be successful. While this involves making information and data accessible, it more importantly involves distilling it for them into knowledge. There is simply too much information to take quick and effective actions in the interests of our organizations. The Audit-Matching KM Projects to Business Objectives It is easy to think too big about KM and therefore to start too big. Remember, managing knowledge is about getting the right information to the right people so they can do their jobs effectively. As described in the existing literature, KM can easily become intimidating because it's too overwhelming. The purpose of the audit is to help you break KM down into digestible, manageable projects without losing sight of the "big picture." It is designed to help you focus quickly on what counts and to adjust your vision as business conditions change. There are four basic questions regarding the audit: What are the success factors of your organization (company, division, and/or department) and the relevant business cycles? What are the important points in these cycles where actions must be swift and effective? Who will use the content? What is the important content used at these points? These questions may seem surprisingly obvious, but few companies understand them as key to valuing their "intellectual capital." Answering these questions means supplementing information technology (IT) skills with other competencies. The first two questions focus on context: what are the most important recurring events, situations, and circumstances in which knowledge is produced and consumed in your company, and how are they related to your organization's goals and objectives? The third question addresses the people: who are the important people in these critical contexts? The fourth question addresses content: what information is critical to the success of these people in these contexts? The first question can be one of the most difficult to answer. Nevertheless, we can't overemphasize this point: don't go any further with KM until you can answer this question. Until you can do so with confidence, your KM initiatives will at worst flounder and fail, and at best will end up as a series of half-baked, poorly coordinated projects. Always remember that the audit is the linchpin between your company's/division's/department's objectives and your KM projects. Example business objectives that will help you to start identifying KM projects are as follows: We will be the easiest automotive parts supplier with whom the big three can build lasting partnerships. We will be recognized as the most responsive package delivery service in the world. We will provide a higher standard of care than any other physician group in our market. Such a statement can provide the starting point for determining which business cycles will be important and what information will be important to capture. Identifying these cycles allows you to identify what Thomas H. Davenport has called "information leverage points" (ILPs)-"information that, once identified, provides a superior map of the roads to business success" (CIO Magazine, June 1, 1996). We've adapted this term to help you identify those points in your important business cycles where data, information, and knowledge must be delivered for your business objectives to be met. For instance, in highly competitive industries, sales cycles tend to be very resource-intensive. Companies in this situation need to learn how to assess their chances of winning deals early. In other words, "qualifying prospects" is an important ILP. Before getting involved, the sales team needs to know a lot of things. One of the most important is which competitors are involved, and what success rates you've had against them in similar situations. This includes more than just statistical data. It requires assessments of the context of wins and losses against those competitors. These "win/loss interviews" can provide the knowledge that allows the sales team to qualify the opportunity: "Pursue the opportunity if it's a construction firm with a high degree of international operations-we are stronger than our competitors here." "Don't try to sell to companies with more than 1000 employees or $200 million in annual revenue-our manufacturing processes generally can't support their volume requirements." Delivering this kind of information and knowledge in reference to an important ILP can improve the performance of the business. Only when you understand the business objectives of your company can you begin. Do not start until you can do this with confidence. Only when you understand the business objectives of your company, division, or department can you begin to identify and scope KM projects. Do not start until you can do this with confidence. If you are unsure of how to find this information, there are a few places to begin looking. You can find your company's business objectives in the form of vision statements, annual reports, executive interviews with the trade press, long-range plan (LRP) statements, strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats (SWOTS) statements, and other documents in which future direction and market position are discussed. The Content Portfolio-Knowing What's Important The content portfolio is the combination of data, information, and knowledge you are seeking to manage. It represents the specific pieces and types of content that your company must effectively package and deliver to people who can act on them as knowledge. This can include regulatory documents, release schedules, competitive intelligence, technical product specifications, software applications, case studies, etc. The content portfolio is not about indexing everything. It is not about applying Web-based search engines to all of your documents and databases. Others have tried this as KM quick fixes. It doesn't work. The content portfolio is a formal recognition that knowledge, information, and data have relative value-relative, that is, in terms of your company's goals and objectives. An example: If executive management has decided that your photocopier company will succeed on the basis of minimizing customer downtime for maintenance and repair, then knowing and sharing troubleshooting skills will be more important than knowledge of emerging photocopier markets or new product development. You're more likely to focus on improving existing products. Accordingly, your KM strategy should understand the cycle of how troubleshooting information is produced and circulated currently-particularly the barriers preventing its flow to field support personnel and back to product development. You'll want to figure out how to document any fixes found in the field and get them back to customer service and product development for verification and circulation back out to the field. You may even begin considering customer "self-service" strategies that would make this troubleshooting information available to customers. ILPs will include, for example, the moment someone figures out the cause of a recurring problem, and the moment someone figures out how to solve it. Moving such knowledge can be the key to achieving your business objectives. Callout: The content portfolio is a formal recognition that knowledge, information, and data have relative value-relative, that is, in terms of your company's goals and objectives. You know that managing knowledge effectively is producing a positive ROI when you begin to see: 1 Measurable efficiencies in product development, production, sales, and service cycles. 2 Improved decision-making at the front lines in your development, production, sales, and support cycles. 3 Better ability to get new partners up to speed quickly. 4 Improved morale because employees are making more effective decisions. 5 Increasing customer loyalty due to better trust in your employees' expertise. The Knowledge Architecture-The Scope of the Effort Success in the emerging information economy is based on effective packaging and delivery of content to the critical users who must use it. You should not try to do this casually. You need to formalize your effort and give it a name. We call it the "knowledge architecture": The knowledge architecture represents your company's formal recognition that it has important experience and expertise that it must preserve and use to its advantage. As such, the knowledge architecture identifies the scope of the investment that will be made in managing knowledge. This is more than a technical solution. It involves three components: People Content Technology Managing knowledge means blending each of the components into a cohesive unit whose main purpose is to understand the important content necessary to meet objectives, the key people who are the suppliers and users of the content, and the technologies appropriate to meet the KM objectives. Everything that follows in this book is designed to help you diagram your knowledge architecture and to begin understanding what the initial time and investment will be. We will provide techniques for building 1) road maps to finding important content, 2) job descriptions for people who will supply the content to your organization, and 3) practical evaluations of the relevant technologies for KM. Remember throughout that the technology of KM is only as good as the people who use and manage the content that rides on top of it. Above all, building a successful knowledge architecture means assessing the important content for the success of your organization, then putting people and technology behind that information. Return on Investment The inevitable question arises: What is this going to cost and is it worth the investment? This is usually followed up with another question: How can I measure my results to determine if the strategy has been effective? In our experience at J.D. Edwards, these can be very difficult questions to answer. As far as measuring the return on an Intranet/Extranet, we have measured the cost savings in terms of employee time saved (7 to 10 hours a month multiplied by the appropriate salaries) as well as printing costs saved ($900,000 in the first year). According to International Data Corporation, who performed our first-year ROI measurements, these cost savings alone yielded an ROI of over 1800%--including content and technical professionals, firewall technologies, management, hardware, software, and other expenses. That return alone justified the cost of our Intranet/Extranet-technology and people included. But how do you measure the return on "managing knowledge"? This is much more difficult because the benefits are much less classically measurable. They are, as we outlined them in the Introduction: Faster, simplified partnering strategies Greater retention of expertise Better and more effective frontline decision-making It certainly seems possible to measure these benefits, but why would you want to? It's enough to know that these areas are being improved. Very few if any trusted measurements exist for determining ROI on IT investments. In fact, most companies have been investing in IT (people included) and absorbing it at a rate unprecedented for anything else in history. But this is occurring in inverse proportion to our ability to measure ROI. For example: the ROI for the adoption of the first mainframes and minicomputers was pretty straightforward: you could process more transactions per day with fewer people. But what's the ROI on an e-mail system? Businesses are adopting Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange much faster than they ever adopted mainframes, and no one seems to be sweating the measurements. At best, they can measure fairly conventional statistics such as inventory turnover, transactions per day, and customer base, but these are industrial economy considerations. In the information economy, as we understand it, you need to measure speed of knowledge transfer in such areas as new employee hires, new business partners, and customer satisfaction.

The need to extract the kind of information that allows people to take actions is becoming paramount. The content portfolio is a formal recognition that knowledge, information, and data have relative value. Building a success- ful knowledge architecture means assessing important content, then putting people and technology behind that information.

Table of Contents

Preface: Who Should Read This Book?

Is This Book Right for You?

Why This Book Is Different.

Acknowledgments.


Introduction: Retooling for the Information Economy.

Data-Induced Paralysis.

Why You Need Managing Knowledge.

A Tactical Definition of Knowledge.

Simplicity and Knowledge.

People, Content, and Technology.

Navigating the Information Maelstrom.

How This Book Is Organized.

I. GETTING STARTED.

1. Strategy.

Beyond Accessibility—From Information Systems to Managing Knowledge.

The Audit—Matching KM Projects to Business Objectives.

The Content Portfolio—Knowing What’s Important.

The Knowledge Architecture’The Scope of the Effort.

Return on Investment.

2. Profiling People.

Whom Do You Profile?

How Do You Profile?

II. ORGANIZING AROUND KNOWLEDGE.

3. Storyboarding Knowledge.

Mapping People and Content.

Step One: Identifying Your Strategic Business Cycles.

Step Two: Mapping Your Information Leverage Points.

Step Three: Adding the People.

Step Four: Identifying the Content.

4. Mapping the Knowledge Network.

Step One: Identifying Content Centers.

Step Two: Adding Content Satellites.

Step Three: Staffing and Assigning Ownership.

Part Three: Knowledge Architecture.

5. Hiring People.

The Levels of Knowledge Managers.

Knowledge Analyst.

Knowledge Author.

Extended Team.

6. Mobilizing Content.

Avoiding the “Index Everything” Fallacy.

Common Vocabulary.

Common Ground.

Content Types.

Maintaining Discipline.

Assigning Ownership.

7. Building the Technical Architecture.

Overview.

Layer One: Access.

Layer Two: Interface.

Layer Three: Intelligence.

Layer Four: Knowledge-Enabling Applications.

Layer Five: Transport.

Layer Six: Repositories.

IV. THE NINETY-DAY ACTION PLAN.

Action Plan: Day 1-Day 30.

Action Plan: Day 31-Day 60.

Action Plan: Day 61-Day 90.

Index.
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Preface

Who Should Read This Book?

• Is your company saving millions of dollars by getting people the information they need?
• Are you sharing information effectively across time zones, cultures, and geographic boundaries?
• Do you have corporate standards for creating, capturing, and delivering important content?

At the end of the 20th century, will your organization be among the shrinking number of companies who aren't managing knowledge? Many companies realize they need to do this, but they don't know how to begin. This book will help you get started with a knowledge management (KM) project. To that end, we focus on the practical application of concepts and techniques that have been useful to us in our efforts. We believe you can use these concepts and procedures in setting up and running your own Web-based KM initiative.

Is This Book Right for You?

This book is for those people who have read some or all of the academic literature on KM, and who (along with their bosses) are convinced that they need to go down this path. Hopefully, you have a champion and an understanding of your company's long-range plan (LRP). If not, you need to target someone and make them read Working Knowledge by Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak, Intellectual Capital by Thomas A. Stewart, and The Knowledge-Creating Company by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, among the many other academic studies on this important topic. These are excellent discussions of the scope of KM, and they were some of the important early motivators for us.

But for those of you looking to get a project or initiative off the ground, this book can help. Maybe you've been formally charged with looking into KM and coming back with some recommendations, but you're not sure where to start. Perhaps your company has a functioning Intranet or Extranet, but the content is out of date and no one seems to be taking the lead on keeping it "fresh." Maybe you have an Intranet with thousands of pages, but you constantly hear the complaint, "I can't find anything, and when I do, I don't know if it's accurate." If you are facing these circumstances, this book is for you.

Why This Book Is Different

While the academic literature on KM is essential reading, there are some important differences between Managing Knowledge and those earlier works. The difference is that those books are exceptionally good at convincing you that you should do KM, but we'll try to convince you that you can do it. Accordingly, we make some assumptions that may or may not be shared with these other works.

Assumption One: Knowledge management does not have to be "profound."

Our purpose is not to address the nature of knowledge. Rather, we want to help you get the right information to the right people so they can take effective action. In this sense, our definition of "managing knowledge" is much more modest than what you may have read elsewhere. It involves understanding who needs what content to be successful in their jobs. In this book, we give you the tools and techniques to make these determinations.

Assumption Two: You have a champion and are figuring out how to get started.

While it is necessary to "think big," you'll need to "start small." Managing Knowledge is about picking a strategic place in your organization that can benefit from managing its knowledge and getting started. In this sense, we aren't going to take on the whole concept of KM. In fact, we're not interested in trying to define the entire scope of this important emerging field. We leave that to others. Accordingly, we don't undertake "literature surveys" or try to delve into the history of knowledge in Western society.

Assumption Three: Document management concepts, technologies, and procedures provide the basic discipline to kick off a successful effort.

The document is an important concept for getting started. In most cases, documents are going to be the vehicles for knowledge. Whether we're talking about HTML pages with links to other documents, application presentation layers with a view into databases, e-mail messages, or multimedia presentations, your focus will be moving knowledge inside and outside your company using documents.

That said, document management provides the central framework and discipline for successfully capturing, validating, and moving content to employees, partners, and customers. We discuss in detail how to set up classification systems (a.k.a. metadata) and the importance of "tagging" documents with consistent classifications. Without these skills, even so-called collaborative technologies won't be as effective as they could be.

Assumption Four: Yours is a mid- to large-size company with an Intranet and Extranet, as well as an Internet presence.

Everything we say in this book assumes that you are (or are going to be) leveraging Web-based technologies to move data, information, and knowledge. While conference calls, digital whiteboards, and pen and paper are viable tools, we believe that the most efficient way to move information within a mid- to large-size company (1000 employees or more) is via an Intranet. We also assume that your company is willing to fund a KM effort. Smaller companies that are centrally located and "tight knit" may be able to move information using less sophisticated means. But if you're larger and globally dispersed--and especially if you have an extensive partnership network--you must have an Intranet/Extranet.

Assumption Five: Your business is consciously preparing for the information economy.

Your executives or boss or someone influential (maybe you) believes that your company must begin retooling itself for the information economy. You don't need convincing any longer. Rather, you want to get started so that you can reap the benefits of competitive advantage before these advantages dry up and become "me too" processes and "best business practices." We'll help you get started by providing a method for taking the oversized concept that is KM and breaking it down into digestible parts that you can implement in the near term.

Acknowledgments

Much of the practical, hard-won knowledge that went into this book was the result of long hours spent between 1994 and 1998 developing solutions and approaches to worldwide, Web-based KM challenges at J.D. Edwards, a business software developer in Denver, Colorado. Thanks go to J.D. Edwards officers Ed McVaney, Chairman of the Board; Buffy Collison, senior vice president of worldwide marketing; and Gay Dickerson, director of media creators, for sharing our vision and helping lead the way.

Members of our Knowledge Resource Strategies Group who helped develop and refine the concepts presented in this book, and with whom it has been a great pleasure to work, include Kristen Schiffner, Bob Zasuly, Michael Lavker, Meredith Monticello, and Debbie Arellano. Special thanks also go to Laurie Fetterolf, J.D. Edwards information and interface designer extraordinaire, who in addition to refining many KM concepts at J.D. Edwards also designed this book. Eagle-eyed online editor K.P. Nelson has been a tremendous help. Many J.D. Edwards technologists deserve praise and credit here as well: Paul Orsak, founder of the Knowledge Garden, and those who helped get us off the ground, including our Internet Services Group and IT department under CIO Mark Endry, and our MIS director Gerry Coady. There are of course many other individuals too numerous to mention.

A tip of the hat goes to SkyWeb's Brian Ward. Thanks to Deb Blecha of Raymond James Consulting. Lee Butler, Sherri Philips, Henry Winkler, and Tulsi Dharmarajan of Microsoft Consulting Services Denver gave much of their time, effort, and support. Thanks to Susan Kannel and Betty Konarski at the Office of Corporate Education at Regis University in Denver. Thanks to Alexis de Planque, senior consultant of Meta Group. Thanks to Denise Vega and Chris Katsaropoulos for paving the path for first-time authors. Thank you to the residents of Steamboat Springs, Colorado for openness to new ideas, friendship, and kind considerations over the years.

Thanks also to our charming and seemingly tireless editor, Elizabeth Spainhour of Addison Wesley Longman, who--appropriately enough--we met over the Internet and who has been a strong supporter of Managing Knowledge in every way, from day one.

Ultimately, of course, without loving support from all our family members, this effort would not have been possible: Susan, Madeline, Mitchel, Lee, and Cal Globe; Michelle, Sam, and Jordan Applehans; and Pam Moore.

--Denver, Parker, and Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1998

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