Chapter 5
Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge Transfer

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How can an organization transfer knowledge
effectively?
 Hire smart people
 Let them talk to one another
How does knowledge transfer?
Knowledge Transfer Dilemmas
 Looking nearby only, Larger corporations
Strategies of Knowledge Transfer

MCC vs Sematech

MCC tried liaisons, assignees, workshops,
training, technical reports, third-party licenses,
production and support of products, and many
other techniques  FAILED

Sematech success due to sponsors (assignees)
who come to participate in research
Water Cooler Discussion

Place of knowledge transfer

IBM Chairman, John Akers


Stay away from water coolers, get back to work
Water cooler discussion – “hit-or-miss”
Talk Rooms

Japanese Pharmacy Company – Dai-Ichi


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
20 Minute Talks With Co-Workers
After hours get togethers
Hardly use email to communicate
Prefer face-to-face
“When you need to transfer knowledge, the
method must always suit the culture.”
Knowledge Fairs

Informal & unstructured gathering of coworkers



Allows for knowledge transfer, co-workers to
interact and meet one another
Companies: Ernst & Young, CSIRO
Versus Structured Corporate Seminars

Tightly woven schedules, no chance for
interaction among co-workers
Other Strategies

Mentorship program


Database of co-workers


Bringing together experienced employees with
less experienced employees
Who is willing to meet with what expertise
Videoconferencing System

Link people with knowledge to who need it
Knowledge Transfer Friction
Friction
Possible Solutions
Lack of Trust
Build relationships and trust
through face-to-face meetings
Different cultures & vocabularies
Create common ground through
education, discussion, teaming,
job rotation
Lack of time & meeting places
Establish times and places for
knowledge transfers
Status and rewards go to
knowledge owners
Evaluate performance and
provide incentives based on
sharing
Direct Contact

Contracting firm for Boston Harbor Tunnel
project



Overseen similar project in New Zealand
Tried to transfer the tacit knowledge explicitly via
email, phone, memorandums  Unsuccessful
Engineers gathered, face-to-face interaction and
transfer of knowledge  Success
“In some cases, there’s no substitute for direct contact”
The Status of the Knower

Be cautious that successful knowledge
transfer can depend heavily on who it is
coming from

People may judge by reputation

Case: CEO (Market Conditions Malaysia)

Librarian, Senior VP
Reflect - Strategies of Knowledge Transfer

Try to focus more on the human aspect of
knowledge transfer

Don’t confine knowledge transfer to email,
improved access, communication, document
repositories, etc
Chapter 6
Knowledge Roles & Skills
Knowledge Oriented Personnel

Planning managers, business analysts,
design & manufacturing engineers, marketing
professionals, secretaries, clerks


Create, share, search out, and use knowledge
Knowledge management is everyone’s job
Knowledge Management Positions

Growth in Knowledge management jobs

Andersen Consulting – 200 KM Jobs





Knowledge integrators – expert in one domain
Knowledge administrators – capturing, storing,
maintaining knowledge that others produce
Ernst & Young, McKinsey, IBM ~ 200 KM Jobs
Coca-Cola – 40 KM Jobs
Hewlett-Packard – 20-30 KM Jobs
Managers of Knowledge Projects

Functions:






Comfortable with technology


Developing project objectives
Assembling & managing teams
Determining & managing customer expectations
Monitoring project budgets & schedules
Identifying & resolving project problems
Web-accessed databases
Should speak the common language & understand
values
Managers of Knowledge Projects

“A little humility goes a long way when you’re
managing a knowledge project.”

Be humble or knowledge may be withheld
Chief Knowledge Officer

Function:

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

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
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
“evangelize” for knowledge and learning from it
Design, implement, oversee firms knowledge infrastructure
Manage relationships with external providers of information
& knowledge (negotiate prices)
Provide critical input to the process of knowledge creation
Design / implement a firm’s knowledge codification
approaches
Measure and manage value of knowledge
Manage the knowledge managers
Lead the development of knowledge strategy
Chief Knowledge Officer

Three most important roles of a CKO:

Building a knowledge culture


Creating a knowledge management infrastructure



Long term plan, hinge on whom you hire, educate
Managers, databases, knowledge bases, various
applications
Making it all pay off economically
Blend of technical, human, financial skills
How To Implement CKO?

Implement with HR / IS Functions


By implementing with HR / IS one may dilute the
importance of knowledge
Stand-alone role



Senior level executive position
Position is important & complex
More desirable  Shows importance of
knowledge
Review: KM Positions

Line workers

Knowledge Management Workers

Knowledge Management Managers

Chief Knowledge Officer
Chapter 7
Technologies For Knowledge Management
Technologies For KM

Case in Point: Hewlett-Packard

Electronic Sales Partner (ESP)




Hundreds of thousands of documents to help sales force
White papers, presentations, technical specs, etc
Readily available to all with access to the intranet
Anyone within HP can submit to ESP



Reviewed by a ESP team to determine if appropriate
Based on how system is being used, being called a
success – “most successful implementation of software I
have seen in twenty years.” –HP Managers
Only problem: becoming difficult to navigate with too
many documents
Technologies for KM

Case in Point: Hewlett-Packard

“Connex” – Web-based system to connect HP
employees with experts within the company


IE: electrical engineer that is expert in ISDN, lives in
Germany
Difficulty: Scientists don’t like to be connotated as
“expert” and they don’t want to post a lot of info
Artificial Intelligence

Case in Point: McDonnell Douglas



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Developed computerized expert system to scan
aircraft approaching a runway
Humans could intuitively determine what a good
landing looked like
Attempted to put this into a computer
After considerable expenses, the system was
found to be only 80% – 85% accurate (compared
to a 2 second human glance)
Broad Knowledge Repositories

Lotus Notes


Web Technology


Lotus Notes Programmers, Lotus Domino Web
Server, Education (How to use Notes)
HTML publishing tools, web server, relational
database system, search engines, an approach to
managing the knowledge, some education
Some use both technologies
Focused Knowledge Environments

Expert Systems


Helps enable the knowledge of one or a few
experts used by a broader group of workers who
need the knowledge
Constraint Based Systems


Suited for situations where there are high levels of
data but less quantitative data
Capture and model the constraints that govern
complex decision making
Real-Time Knowledge Systems

Case Based Reasoning (CBR) systems


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Branch of AI found in the customer support and
service process in firms
Leading vendor: Inference Corp
Works best when there are a few experts who
construct & maintain the ‘cases’
Must also have a domain expert – decide on when
a new case should be created, when an old one
has become obsolete and whether a submitted
case is valid
Real-Time Knowledge Systems

SoultionBuilder

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Built by Primus Corporation for the Customer
Support Consortium
Breaking down a problem or situation into its
knowledge components
Long-Term Analysis Systems

Neural Networks

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Statistically oriented tool that uses data to classify
cases into one category or the other
Systems that learn
Need a very knowledgeable user – at least initially
Problem – Difficult to explain why it did what it did
Also used along with other statistical analysis
tools in data mining
What Technologies can & can not do


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Technology alone
 Won’t make a person with expertise share it
 Won’t make an employee who does not seek knowledge to start
using a knowledge base
 Won’t create learning organization, a meritocracy, or a
knowledge-creating company
Technology not useful when it comes to knowledge creation itself
– still a job for individuals or groups & their brains
However,
 Technology can help in expanding access & helping in getting the
right knowledge to the right people
 Presence of knowledge technologies may also positively impact
the culture of the organization itself
Chapter 8 – Knowledge
Management Projects in Practice
Key Points
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Studied 31 projects in 20 different companies
to draw conclusions
None an optimal model
Million dollar question – Is it really
KNOWLEDGE being managed?
Most fall short of knowledge based
organizational transform
Types of KM Projects
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Self funding projects
Company funded projects
Hybrid projects
Centralized Coordination
Decentralized projects
Common Characteristics
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Defined Objectives
Dedicated champion for the project
Specific financial and human resources
committed to the project
Distinction between knowledge and
information
Objectives Shared

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
Create knowledge repositories
Improve knowledge access
Improve knowledge culture & environment
Knowledge Repositories

Three basic types

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External knowledge (e.g. competitive
intelligence)
Structured internal knowledge (e.g. product
oriented marketing materials and methods,
research reports)
Informal internal knowledge (e.g. discussion
databases)
Knowledge Repositories

External Knowledge

E.g. Automobile company


Structured internal knowledge

E.g. Hewlett-Packard


GrapeVINE
Electronic Sales Partner
Informal internal knowledge

E.g. Hewlett-Packard

Trainer’s Trading Post
Knowledge Access & Transfer

Objective: Finding the right person with the
required knowledge and transferring it to the
person who needs it


Knowledge Repository = Library
Knowledge Access = Yellow Pages
Knowledge Access & Transfer

Implementation Strategies


Build & manage expert networks a.k.a maps of
knowledge
Consolidating and categorizing knowledge


Tacit knowledge transfer


Microsoft’s SPUD project
BP’s Virtual Teamwork Project
Human Communication

Sematech
Knowledge Environment

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Measure/ improve the value of knowledge
capital
Building awareness and cultural receptivity
Changing behavior when it comes to
knowledge
Improving the KM process itself
Reality



Most projects examined a combination of one or
more of the types mentioned
Would expect KM projects working with more than
one focus more likely to succeed
Drawbacks



Absence of clear demarcations of project types and
fuzziness of project objectives may cause measurement
problems
Prioritizing different aspects of a hybrid project becomes
difficult
Linking knowledge and financial gains is difficult at times
Success in KM Projects
~Attributes to define success~

Growth in

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Resources attached to the project
Volume of knowledge content & usage
Project sustains beyond individuals involved
Comfort level throughout the organization
with KM
Some evidence of financial return either to
the project itself or to some unit of the
organization
Factors leading to project success


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Knowledge oriented culture
Technical & organizational infrastructure
Senior management support
Link to economics & industry value
Modicum of process orientation
Clarity of vision & language
Non trivial motivational aids
Some level of knowledge structure
Multiple channels for knowledge transfer
Chapter 9 – The Pragmatics
of KM
Common Sense about KM



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
Place to start is with high value knowledge
Start with focused pilot project & let demand
drive additional initiatives
Work along multiple fronts at once
Don’t put off what gives you too much trouble
until it’s too late
Get help throughout the organization quickly
Getting started in KM





Start small, achieve something and then harp about
it
Start with a recognized business problem that
involves knowledge
Consider the importance of the specific knowledge
domain to the firm
Do not pick a domain that is under your control
Knowledge is too complex a phenomenon to entrust
to narrowly targeted change programs
Leveraging Existing Approaches

Most existing projects have better
management of what the organization knows
as a key component

Already takes into consideration existing
organizational issues
Leading with Technology



Most firms start KM in the domain of
technology
Should not implement IT just for the sake of
KM
Would be most likely to succeed in a
technology oriented organization

E.g. Andersen Consulting
Leading with Quality/ Reengineering/
Best Practices



Build KM on the quality/ reengineering efforts
of a company
Should only be used as a springboard to
other forms of KM
Could prove problematic if considered the
ONLY form of knowledge worth collecting and
sharing
Leading with Organizational Learning

Focus on organizational learning ideal for
start


Rarely ever done
Problem:

World of organizational learning does little to
structure knowledge, to capture & leverage it
Leading with Decision Making



Knowledge proves useful to organizations
because of the ability to improve decisions
and actions taken on the basis of this
knowledge
‘Who knows what when’
Tricky business


Difficulty in linking specific knowledge to specific
decisions
Politics
Leading with accounting


Not recommended as a starting place for
managing knowledge
Accounting systems and practices unlikely to
change

Sisyphian cause
KM Pitfalls

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If we build it……
Let’s put the Personnel Manual online
None dare call it knowledge
Every man a knowledge manager
Justification by faith
Restricted Access
Bottoms Up!
QUESTIONS?