K Community talk at Informatics ,Bangalore
By Sourav Mukherji
The talk basically focused on the evolution of KM in organizations
.
The motivation for this interest in Knowledge and management has come about primarily due tot he
following reasons

Knowledge is the only source of sustainable competitive advantage
It is a resource that can give competitive advantage is valuable ,rare,inimitable and nonsubstitutable.

Increase in the knowledge component of most products and services that we use.

The rapid advancement if IT which is an enabler for knowledge management.
It has helped knowledge management by providing tools for processing,storage,communication
,search algorithms etc for Data,Information and knowledge.

Organizations need to continuously innovate to remain competitive. However large
organizations do not seem to be innovating as fast as small organizations.
There is a lot of research about the innovation process in mature organizations i.e. they try to answer
the question of how to maintain competitive advantage by innovating continuously?
But there is a dearth of literature about how innovations happens in the nascent and new organizations.
First Steps in Knowledge Management
Guiding Principles
Learn once,Use multiple times
Economies of Scale and Scope
Reuse
Alignment with business objectives
Process and technology
This covers the following aspects of the management of knowledge.
 Information and Communication Technology
 Databases,Search Algorithms
 Currency and Version control
 Metrics and Measurement
Organization and Human Resources
This aspect covers
Incentive systems for KM
Matching of Demand and Supply
Evangelization,leadership commitment
Cycle of Knowledge creation and sharing
Individual
Group
Socialize ,Externalize Interpret
Experiment,Acquire,Insight
Internalize,Apply
Codify ,integrate
,Institutionalize
The also pointed out that Knowledge generated inside a group resides within a group even after the
members of the original group have left.
Enterprise KM system
He said that the basic components of Enterprise KM system are
 Applications
 Processes
 Infrastructure
and these need to be managed to build an effective system.
Measurement of KM efforts
Initially it was thought that KM efforts could be measured like the quality initiatives in an organization.
But in KM measurement it is difficult as to attribute how much of the results were a consequence of the
KM efforts.
Organizations use Objective and/or Perceptual measures to evaluate their KM efforts
eg -Wipro considers the engagement with the KM site by its employees as one of the measures.
Deployment of KM solutions
This involves successive trade offs.
 Start small or big:Should the organization first experiment with KM in a small group or should
it go for a organization wide implementation.
 Financial Incentives or Social Incentives:Financial incentives might be a good idea to begin
with but in the log run as the KM process matures the social incentives are more important
 Data,Information or Knowledge:
 Transactions or Interactions
First Inflexion point in KM
Significant part of knowledge is not amenable to documentation
 Complex ,intangible & tacit
 Architectural & system
 Organization Specific
 Contextually Embedded
 Causally ambiguous
 Private and path dependent
 Abstract and conceptual
 Intuitive and Expertize driven
Due to the above characteristics of Knowledge,we have the following consequences
 Knowledge is less amenable to imitation or spillover
 Sustainable source of competitive advantage
 Difficult to manage or measure
Therefore such knowledge can only be shared or recreated people to people.
The 2 approaches to managing knowledge are
Codification:Codify knowledge in documents and databases to gain from reuse
Personalization:Making people to people connections for synthesis of expertise
eg :British petroleum conducted an exercise to codify the knowledge of one of its scientists who was
an expert in locating oil wells. They engaged Prof Simon who tried to make an artificial neural network
model of the scientists brain. But the project was finally declared a failure since such a model could not
be built .But Prof Simon himself had become another expert in location oil wells.
This shows that some knowledge can only be transferred through socializations and cannot be easily
externalized.
He also gave the example of Strategy consulting firms.
Firms like McKinsey go in more for personalization and socialization for their knowledge transfer
since they offer customized solutions to novel problems. Their work in expert economics. But firms
like E&Y,Anderson focus more on codification since they prefer to invest in a solution once and reuse
it many time. This is reuse economics.
WIPRO'S KM SYSTEM
Document Repository
Experts Repository
Collaborative Platforms
Explicit Knowledge focus
Creation of Domain Specialists
User groups with specific
interests
Reduce rework
Increase efficiency
Make people to people
connections
Communities of Practice
Blogs ,Social Networks
It is also important to understand that the learning habits of individuals differ and to enable KM
systems to cater to the needs of the entire organization.
Knowledge Transfer Between Projects
Components of Project memory are
 Project Context :Goals agendas and players involved
 Project Process:Tacit,Difficult to capture
 Decision Rational:Tacit,Difficult to capture
 External Artifacts:Project Source,Output documents
Transfer of Tacit knowledge is bound by time and space.
Failures and the learnings they offer
It is important to articulate failures in an organization clearly since this will help to see that they are not
repeated.
Eg: Toyota has Failure museum which showcases failed prototypes.