Knowledge Management
Thomas J. Froehlich, Ph.D.
Program Director, IAKM
Professor, SLIS
Knowledge Management Problem
30 years of organizational knowledge, retired.
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Lack of KM Costs Money
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Failure to retain tacit knowledge of employees
costs money: The so-called “discontinuity of
knowledge in organizations” occurs when
experienced knowledge workers move from one
position to another, including retirement, without
having techniques or facilities to transfer their tacit
knowledge to co-workers.
For every knowledge worker with an $80,000
salary:
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$6,000 is wasted on time spent on failed searches
$12,000 is wasted in recreating information that already
exists
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Knowledge Management
Aspects include:
 planning, capturing, organizing, interconnecting
and providing access to organizational intellectual
capital through intellectual and information
technologies such as knowledge organization, the
creation of metadata, or software development
(e.g., data mining)
 directing or supervising such assets and those that
are involved in these processes.
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Knowledge Management
Among other things, KM involves:
 The conversion of the tacit knowledge of organizations into articulated
knowledge
 The capture of knowledge-how, procedural knowledge, in addition to
factual knowledge
 The recovery of knowledge lost in complex and diverse systems
 The exploitation of environmental knowledge for competitive
intelligence
 The coordination and integration of information systems, activities and
environments
 The Delphi Group defines KM as “the leveraging of collective wisdom to
increase responsiveness and innovation.” (The Delphi Group, The
Language of Knowledge, www.delphigroup.com, accessed 11/13/03.)
We will look at some of these aspects shortly
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Approaches to Knowledge
Management
There are many approaches to KM -- just a brief look at the web will disclose that
several disciplines have laid claims to or appropriated the phrase,
“Knowledge Management”:
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Library and Information Science
Schools of Business
The former two are the more dominant disciplines, but there are others:
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Schools of Public Policy (e.g., George Mason University)
While Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication have yet to create a degree,
there is considerable interest in news media organizations for KM options
There tends to be a bifurcation in the approach, depending on the college or
university:
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Knowledge Management –emphasis on the capture and organization of resources
Knowledge Management -- emphasis on management (of people and resources)
While the IAKM program is trying to avoid this bifurcation, it is important to
discuss these dimensions
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Knowledge Management Forum:
Views of Knowledge Management
KM “consists of activities focused on the organization gaining
knowledge from its own experience and from the experience
of others, and the judicious application of that knowledge to
fulfill the mission of the organization.
These activities are executed by marrying technology,
organizational structures, and cognitive based strategies to
raise the yield of existing knowledge and produce new
knowledge.
Critical in this endeavor is the enhancement of the cognitive
system (organization, human, computer, or joint humancomputer system) in acquiring, storing and utilizing
knowledge for learning, problem solving, and decision
making.” (R. Gregory Wenig)
from the KM_Forum: http://www.km-forum.org/
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Knowledge Management Forum:
Views of Knowledge Management
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“The management process of: ensuring that the organisation’s
knowledge needs are met; and exploiting the organisation’s existing
knowledge assets.
Organisations suffer from specific characteristic problems
associated with knowledge:
– knowledge bottleneck: a particular skill or expertise is in short
supply causing a bottleneck that restricts the operations that
compete for that supply;
– corporate amnesia: organisations fail to retain knowledge
acquired and lessons learned in the past. The people who had
the knowledge leave and no retrievable record remains;
– sub-optimal decision-making: the best knowledge available fails
to be applied correctly leading to sub-optimal decision-making;
– wasted resources: since the organisation does not really know
what knowledge resources it has it fails to capitalise on potential
new initiatives.” (Robert Taylor)
KM_Forum: http://www.km-forum.org/
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Challenges to Knowledge
Management
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Part of the reason for variations in approaches may be due to
the fact that we do not have a shared understanding of
knowledge, particularly in an organizational context.
Some have argued that we need to have precise definitions of
knowledge, information, etc. in order to proceed in the field.
The word ‘information’ is less problematic in these contexts,
for while we might characterize information as “meaningful
units of data”, one is never sure how and when individuals
turn information into knowledge, or that what one is putting
into a database is “knowledge.”
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Challenges to Knowledge
Management
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One approach has claimed that “Knowledge is information that is
contextual, relevant, and actionable.”* Knowledge facilitates
decision-making and subsequent action. It is not clear how this
helps providing a clear understanding of what knowledge is.
Knowledge is based on context, content and intent -- and while we
can capture content and to some degree context, intent is elusive.
A post-modern, non-Cartesian approach would be to assert that
such definitions are not required and would not advance the work in
Knowledge Management
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In effect, we do not need perfect definitions of knowledge or information,
only what kind of knowledge or information is required to advance the
purposes of the organization.
*[Decision Support Systems and Intelligent Systems, Efraim Turban and Jay E. Aronson, 6th edition, 2001,
Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, p. 388]
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Challenges to KM
Rather than a definition of knowledge, one seeks to:
 Identify the information/knowledge needs of the
organization
 Identify gaps in knowledge and latent or tacit
knowledge
 Identify expertise
 Create strategies and policies to deal with these
 Strive to integrate processes and systems
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Challenges to Knowledge
Management
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In addition, there are many contexts for KM:
can KM be abstracted from any context?
Does it have a set of general principles that
would apply to any context?
The IAKM program asserts that while there
maybe specializations within KM (medical
knowledge management, government
knowledge management – cf.
http://www.km.gov/, etc.), there are general
principles of knowledge management
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IRM Concepts
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Some think that KM is something completely innovative.
Many of the key ideas are prefigured in Information
Resources Management (IRM)
Even though IRM did not manage to become a pervasive
strategy in many organizations, its influence was fairly broad
and its ideas provided a framework for KM
In many organizations, information resources are dispersed,
fragmented, and decentralized.
One of the objectives of IRM was to bring these resources
under comprehensive inventory and control so as to
eliminate costly redundancies, inconsistencies and
incompatibilities of the various sources, resources and flow
of information
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IRM Concepts
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Melanie Norton (in Introductory Concepts in Information
Science. ASIS Monography Series. Medford, NJ: Information
Today, 2000, using the work of D. Marchand) articulates key
ideas:
 Information is a critical organizational resource that must be
defined and measured within the organization's various
management systems. Information can not be considered a
free good with the cost of information-handling technologies
and systems buried in overhead or other direct and indirect
cost accounts.
 Information users must be accountable for the effective and
efficient management of information for which they serve as
caretakers, including production, acquisition, storage,
retrieval, use, and disposition of information.
 Information resource needs must be integrally linked with
basic organizational management processes such as
planning and management
control
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IRM Concepts
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Information technologies must be integrated and managed
together as a management whole, avoiding incompatibility
barriers in information processing and sharing.
Information is a resource that has a life cycle. It is acquired or
produced, stored, and used. And, at some point, it becomes
invalid, obsolete, or outdated, and must be disposed of.
Attention in the organization should be shifted from
technology to the content of information. Those in the
organization must know how to ask the right questions and
know when the technology produces the right answers.
Marchand and Kresslein (1988) add that this clearly means
maximizing the quality, use, and value of information and
knowledge in the organization.
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Objectives of IRM4:
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to establish an environment where information flows into
corporate decisions
to establish and practice techniques that compare the cost of
creating or collecting information with the projected benefits
derived from its use.
to effect changes in attitudes, policies, and practices so that
information comes to be viewed as a major asset in doing
the business of the enterprise and in managing it.
to analyze requirements before acquiring information
technologies rather than the reverse.
to legitimatize the role of the information manager, (e.g., in
challenging line and staff managers on their IRM practices.)
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Objectives of IRM4:
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to make users responsible for their information production activities
by including them in systems design and other decisions by
charging them for various services and by making them accountable
for staff facilities and other resources needed to produce
information.
to identify research and development (R & D) opportunities both onsight and off-sight aimed at improving ways in which information
resources can be applied to corporate decisions and problems.
to fix accountability for the efficient and effective acquisition and
utilization of information resources as well as disposal of excess
resources by designated employees throughout the organization.
to make consideration of corporate information needs routine in
doing business such as in making decisions about marketing
strategies, plant locations, new sales offices, and consumer
surveys.
(4 from Karen B. Levitan, "Information Resources Management," Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), vol. 17, 1982, p. 227-266)
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KM: New Dimensions beyond IRM
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The environment has changed, contributing to the emergence and
evolution of KM:
 Change has accelerated, along with the emergence and growth of
networked organizations, and revolution in information technologies
 The marketplace has become global, increasing competition and leading
to better quality and more efficient means of production; there is
increased information about companies, competitors, customers,
materials and processes; and there is a need for greater accountability
among stakeholders such as managers and customers
 This environment has fostered such developments as total quality
management, benchmarking, best practices, strategic planning,
organizational learning, all of which have some relationship or is
constitutive of KM. KM entails not only value-added information, but
fosters information for decision-making (especially for competitive
advantage) and fosters knowledge creation, sharing and re-use.
 “The only sustainable advantage a firm has comes from what it
collectively knows, how efficiently it uses what it knows, and how
readily it acquires and uses new knowledge. Davenport and Prusak
(1998).
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Distinctive Aspects to KM:
Intellectual Capital
The focus on intellectual capital/assets (also called invisible assets) of
an organization:
 Intellectual capital is composed of the intangible assets of an
organization, such as including employee knowledge, corporate
memory, intellectual property, and research. A study at Columbia
University estimated that spending on intangible assets like
research and development and employee education results in a
return eight times greater than an equal investment in new plants
and equipment. The latter lead to revolutionary advances in the
organization.
Source: http://www.best-in-class.com/research/bestpracticespotlights/intellectual_capital_20.htm.
Accessed September 1, 2002.
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While there is little difference between corporate intellectual assets
and corporate memory, the former tends to suggest information in
explicit form whereas the latter does not. The latter involves a
capitalization of know-how that is typically dispersed in
organizations and KM serves to integrate and make explicit this
corporate know-how.
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Intellectual Capital
KM Quick, A KM Tool for Government Practitioners (http: www.km.gov, accessed 10/1/02 ) defines IC in the
following way (providing one of the broadest approaches):
Intellectual Capital: Includes all of the knowledge resources of an organization,
including human capital, social capital, customer capital, and
organizational/ structural/enterprise capital
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Human Capital: The individual and collective capabilities of the employees
of the organization, including their knowledge, skills, abilities,
competencies, education, know-how and experience.
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While previously the predominant view was to consider employees as costs, today employees
are more frequently viewed as assets. The newer trend is to view employees as investors.
Increasingly, employees’ capacity for learning and their abilities to be creative and innovative
are highly valued assets.
Social Capital: The informal networks, relationships, trust, and shared
understanding between individuals in organizations. Social capital is
manifested in the structure of relationships between employees as they
interact in the organization. In addition to interactions across the networks
built on relationships, social capital also takes into account all the aspects
of language (culture, context, etc.) and patterning (sequence, amount,
timing, etc., of exchange).
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Intellectual Capital
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Structural/Enterprise Capital: Everything that is left when the
employees go home. Includes property, patents, copyrights, business
processes, systems, codified policies and procedures, etc. Also
includes relationships with stakeholders. Often, organizations have
highly developed structural capital that uniquely enhances their
efficiencies and effectiveness.
Customer Capital: The quality of the interaction and the relationship
between the organization and the customers that enables the
organization to effectively serve the customers.
– External capital is measured by criteria such as the efficiency of
product or service delivery and the satisfaction and loyalty of the
customer.
– Interaction with customers is increasingly virtual and is evolving to
enable self-service and a collaborative relationship.
These four capitals, comprising intellectual capital, refer to a value not
usually reflected in accounting systems, but many say it should be.
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Mapping IC and KM terms (km.gov)
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Intellectual Capital
Human Capital =
Social Capital =
Customer Capital =
Structural/Enterprise Capital =
Knowledge Management
KM Terminology
Tacit Knowledge
Social Knowledge
Customer Knowledge
Explicit Knowledge
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Distinctive Aspects to KM
One of the leading KM theorists and practitioners, Rudy Ruggles,
designates the following as integral activities of KM:
 Generating new knowledge
 Accessing valuable knowledge from outside sources
 Using accessible knowledge in decision making
 Embedding knowledge in processes, products and/or services
 Facilitating knowledge growth through culture and incentives
 Transferring existing knowledge into other parts of the organization
 Measuring the value of knowledge assets and/or the impact of
knowledge management
Source: Gotcha: “What is Knowledge Management?”
http://www.sims.berkeley,edu/courses/is213/s99/Projects/P9/web_sit
e/about_km.html. Accessed 9/15/02
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KM: Management of Knowledge
and/or Knowledge of Management?
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KM predominates among business management
professionals and information management professionals.
In fact, if one emphasizes the word ‘knowledge’ in KM, one
tends to focus on information activities (the processes and
content of knowledge, whether data, processes or
procedures). Here KM is seen as M of K, management of
knowledge. This viewpoint tends to be espoused by those
trained as information professionals.
If one emphasizes on the word, ‘management’ in KM, one
tends to think of those who manage such operations, who
direct the creation of intellectual capital and those who
work towards those ends. We might say that this entails
knowledge of management (K of M) in the sense of directing
operations that manage resources and people. This
viewpoint is espoused by those who educate and train
business management professionals
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KM: Management of Knowledge
and/or Knowledge of Management?
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While I am playing on the phrase, KM, with readings of
‘K of M’ or ‘M of K,’ to emphasize different aspects,
these aspects are interrelated: the management of
people and management of knowledge, form a dynamic
relationship
Yet the way it is playing out in American academic
institutions, it seems that two streams of professionals
are being created – one in schools of library and
information science and one in school of business.
As noted earlier, the IAKM program is trying to avoid
this bifurcation, while supporting diversity in the
production of knowledge workers. In effect students
should get equal doses of K of M and M of K.
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Management of Knowledge (K of M)
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Those who manage knowledge must have some level of
understanding in: knowledge organization, classification, storage,
retrieval, indexing (including metadata and thesaurus development),
labeling, terminology, intellectually connecting, document mark-up,
systems for interconnected documents (SGML, RDF, concept maps,
etc). That is to say, they must have a solid dose of information
literacy skills and a good dose of librarian and computer skills.
They must not only store but also retrieve the various knowledges
that constitute the intellectual capital of an organization and any
information that facilitates decision-making for the organization.
This may involve accessing commercial information services (e.g.,
Dialog), digitizing information, building databases, web portals
(intranet, extranet), digital libraries, content management systems,
and information architecture for the collection, storage, access and
dissemination of information.
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KM: Focus on Information (M of K)
From an information viewpoint, there are at least five aspects
that create, develop and maintain information as intellectual
capital:
 The exploitation of latent knowledge in an organization
 The importance of ‘knowledge how’ rather than ‘knowledge
about.’
 The roles and transitions of tacit to explicit knowledge in the
knowing organization
 The role of cultural knowledge
 The development of information practices to address
competitive intelligence, business intelligence and/or social
intelligence, when appropriate for the knowing organization
or intelligent organization
 The creation, tapping and monitoring communities of
practice, so as to uncover and disseminate “best practices”
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Latent Knowledge
While in KM literature, there is only made a distinction between tacit knowledge
and explicit knowledge, there is the need (in my view) to distinguish at least
three forms of non-explicit knowledge: latent knowledge, tacit knowledge
and implicit knowledge. At the moment, we focus on latent knowledge:
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There may be much latent knowledge, not in the sense that information must
be interpreted (potential knowledge), but in the sense that there is
knowledge that is lost or unrealized in explicit data and information
resources.
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Because of the increasing complexity and diversity of information systems
and sources, knowledge often gets lost. Techniques must be employed to
prevent such loses.
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Furthermore, existing resources must be exploited so that new knowledge
can be extracted from the formal data stores, through connecting, crossinterrogation, interleaving, manipulation, mining or other processes,
typically using a combination of intellectual and computer technologies.
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Latent Knowledge
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Latent knowledge can be achieved through data mining (e.g.,
through use of computer algorithms and statistics to find find
meaningful patterns in data) or in content mining (e.g. though
the use of metatags – document indexing terms, XML and
RDF to extract or connect meaningful chunks of information)
Latent knowledge, implicit and tacit knowledge are different.
Latent knowledge is potential knowledge, not the
presupposed background of explicit knowledge (implicit
knowledge), and not as employee’s specialized know-how
related to their job (tacit knowledge) but knowledge gained by
extracting or linking or mapping information stores, i.e. by
extracting explicit knowledge from explicit knowledge (data in
various respositories).
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‘Knowledge About’ versus
‘Knowledge How’
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Taking another framework, there are two kinds of knowledge
common in organizations: ‘knowledge about’ and ‘knowledge
how.’
‘Knowledge about’ is explicit knowledge such as payroll,
inventories, and trends analysis.
‘Knowledge how,’ procedural knowledge, is knowledge about how
to do something, how to find knowledge, to extract knowledge
from the existing stores, to find expertise in the organization, etc.
Such procedural knowledge is often difficult to represent in
documents, and yet critical in creating or transforming knowledge.
For example, the use of metadata, data about data, such as the
labeling of key terms, often supply the means by which knowledge
may be elicited by procedural means – e.g., a person is labeled
with a particular form of expertise
A good KM system must facilitate access of sources to know-how,
whether in files or in the expertise of an employee. This
knowledge is often tacit.
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Tacit versus Explicit Knowledge
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There is also tacit or unformalized knowledge and articulated or formal
knowledge in organizations.
KM practitioners and theorists trace the notion of tacit knowledge to the
work of Michael Polyani (The Tacit Dimension. London, Routledge
Kegan Paul, 1966). For him, tacit knowledge was personal knowledge
derived from individual experience, drawing on such intangible things
as beliefs, clues, hunches, instinct, values and perspective, implying an
intimate connection between knowledge and action
Tacit knowledge is the intimate know-how of the experienced employee.
It is the knowledge taken for granted until the employee departs the
organization. Such tacit information disappears with the employee
unless it is captured and recorded.
Chun Wei Choo defines tacit knowledge as “the implicit knowledge used
by organizational members to perform their work skillfully.” (Chun Wei
Choo, Information Management for the Intelligent Organization, (Medford, NJ: ASIS&T,
2002), p. 264)
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Tacit versus Explicit Knowledge
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Kevin Oakes and Raghavan Rengarajan estimate that as much as 80% of the
knowledge of any company is tacit. (“E-learning: The hitchhiker’s guide to
knowledge management,”T&D, June 2002 v56 i6 p75(3)).
They also argue that to manage explicit (structured and unstructured)
knowledge, several frameworks have to be in place:
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effective search (based on metadata and browsability),
a content repository (a common, well-organized storage facility would help locate
content or expertise),
publishing (the ability to get new knowledge into the system easily – particularly
through email and word processing and other common productivity tools in
business) and
personalization (adaptation to individual users).
On the other side, managing tacit knowledge involves managing the people
who have the expertise, “by treating people with specific knowledge as
assets.” The also note that “The lack of reusability of experts [when they are
still employed or available] emphasizes the importance of converting as
much as possible into tangible knowledge. That concept is the heart of
many KM systems.”
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Tacit versus Explicit and Implicit
Knowledge
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Not all tacit knowledge can be made explicit and tacit
knowledge is often hard to capture because it cannot be
easily verbalized because “it is expressed through actionbased skills and cannot be reduced to rules and recipes.”
(Chun Wei Choo, Information Management for the Intelligent
Organization, (Medford, NJ: ASIS&T, 2002), p. 264)
In my view tacit knowledge is specialized knowledge that an
employee acquires in the course of his employment, that
allow her or him to effectively to carry out their work. Tacit
knowledge is different from implicit knowledge, which the
general framework that makes, for example, written or spoken
language comprehensible (e.g., a well-formed sentence)
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Tacit versus Explicit Knowledge
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Implicit knowledge is the foundation of tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge or
latent knowledge:
– Tacit knowledge (1) is experiential know-how, usually inarticulate, but some of
which can be made articulate.
– Implicit Knowledge (2) is preunderstanding – an understanding of the context,
of the environment and of the language employed that makes explicit
knowledge possible and forms the basis for tacit knowledge (1). Most of this
remains inarticulate, e.g., as the deep structure of grammar: e.g., we
recognize ill-formed sentences without necessarily being able to say why.
– Latent knowledge is derived from explicit data stores, e.g., through data
mining, but it is only meaningful through human interpretation which involves
a pre-understanding.
Explicit knowledge is articulated and is often electronically stored. Explicit
knowledge resides in documents such as letters, memoranda, white papers, and
other contributions to a knowledge database. The document is clearly the single
most important record of an organization’s knowledge processes. Ninety percent
of a business’ operating knowledge resides in documents or in the minds of the
knowledge workers that produce them.2 Documents are the record keeping
medium of business.
2 Mike Bonaventura, , “The Benefits of a Knowledge Culture,” Aslib Proceedings
49 (April 1997): 83-84.
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Tacit versus Explicit Knowledge
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Explicit knowledge can be content-based (i.e., the subject of
document) or procedure-based (i.e., how to go about
something or locate in-house experts)
The process of transforming tacit knowledge to explicit
knowledge emerges through the interaction of people within
the organization. An important part of knowledge
management is the exchange from tacit knowledge to explicit
and explicit knowledge to tacit, which in turn needs to be
made explicit.3 These exchanges require an organizational
culture that encourages and promotes sharing. The
organization must value its collective knowledge and must
learn to appreciate and promote information sharing.
3Marianne
Broadbent, “The Phenomenon of Knowledge Management: What does it Mean to the Information
Professional?” Information Outlook (May 1998): 25-26.
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Transformations
According to Nonaka and Takeuchi there are four types of knowledge
transformations:
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from implicit to implicit knowledge: socialization
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from implicit to explicit knowledge: externalization
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from explicit to explicit knowledge: combination
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from explicit to implicit knowledge: internalization
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[Tacit knowledge and implicit knowledge are most often used
interchangeably].
Most organizational theories analyze three of these, namely socialization,
combination and internalization. Combination is the general realm of
librarians and information scientists.
Taking the perspective of a business, Nonaka and Takeuchi study all four
processes, and underscore the central role of implicit knowledge. They
argue that knowledge creation is dependent of the subjective dialogue of
content and context, that remains most often tacit.
[Nonaka, I., Takeuchi, H. (1995): The Knowledge-Creating Company, Oxford Univ. Press – source for next page as
well]
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Other Dimensions
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Included in Explicit to Explicit Transformation
would be the uncovering of latent knowledge.
We have mentioned many of the important
aspects of KM, but a few other dimensions
must be presented.
In addition, an integrated structure would be
useful
Knowledge Management
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KM Overview
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Knowledge Management
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Other Dimensions
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Communities of practice
Competitive, business and social intelligence
Organizational learning
KM Challenges
KM Benefits
Knowledge Management
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Communities of Practice
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Fostering or culling “communities of practice” is another key aspect of KM,
in which tacit knowledge is made explicit, but it provides a particular,
productive spin.
“Communities of practice,” a notion pioneered in 1991 by Etienne Wagner
and Jean Lave (Communities of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
occur everywhere –they could but need not be aligned with an organizational
department. They arise whenever people address common, recurring
problems, such as salesmen, perhaps even with different companies but
selling the same type of product line, share thoughts on how to close a sales
deal.
There are at least two types:
– members, groups or subgroups of an organization, bound by common
objectives and/or goals within the organization – they could be but most
often are not formally created
– Members or groups constituted by common goals or objectives across
different organizations or environments.
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Communities of Practice
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Out of these members, groups or subgroups one can seek to locate
expertise and/or articulate the ´best practices´ that can realize the goals or
objectives of the community of practice. For example, network
professionals that install Novell Netware may discover the best ways in
which to bring up a network with the least number of potential problems –
such practices would be disseminated to Novell Netware engineers no
matter what their employing organization.
Communities of Practice are not organizational units, but informal
groupings of people, bound together by common learning, a common
project or by common set of actors.
According to E. L. Lesser and J. Storck [“Communities of practice and
organizational performance,” IBM Systems Journal, Dec. 2001, v40, i4,
p831(11)] suggest:
“One may think of a community of practice as a group of people playing in a field defined by
the domain of skills and techniques over which members of the group interact. Being on the
field provides the members with a sense of identity—both in the individual sense and a
contextual sense, that is, how the individual relates to the community as a whole. (1) a sense
of identity is important because it determines how an individual directs his or her attention. (2)
What a person pays attention to is, in turn, a primary factor in learning”
42
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Communities of Practice
Strock and Hill [“Knowledge Diffusion through Strategic
Communities,” Sloan Management Review 41, 2, 63-74 (2000)]
further assert that there are important differences between
teams and communities:
1.
“Team relationships are established when the organization
assigns people to be team members. Community relationships
are formed around practice.
2.
Similarly, authority relationships within the team are
organizationally determined. Authority relationships in a
community of practice emerge through interaction around
expertise.
3.
Teams have goals, which are often established by people not
on the team. Communities are responsible only to their
members.
4.
Teams rely on work and reporting processes that are
organizationally defined. Communities develop their own
processes”
43
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Communities of Practice


44
“A Primer on Communities of Practice” describes them in the
following way: “A community of practice is different from a
business or functional unit in that it defines itself in the doing, as
members develop among themselves their own understanding of
what their practice is about. It is different from a team in that the
shared learning and interest of its members is what keeps it
together. It is defined by knowledge rather than task, and exists
because participation has value to its members. Its life cycle is
determined by the value that it provides to its members, not by an
institutional schedule.” (http://www.km.gov/cop/cop_primer.html)
Any good KM system must support collaboration and collaborative
processes, knowledge sharing and processes that support them,
both in communities of practice and in organizational units.
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Enabling Knowledge Creation
Given the necessary subjective foundations for the discovery or application
of knowledge, there is a limit on what can be managed in knowledge. What
can be managed is only what is explicit or could be made explicit or the
conditions for its creation. Von Kkrogh, Ichijo and Nonaka (2000) argue that
the function of a business is less about knowledge management than about
knowledge enabling.
 Explicit knowledge can be enabled as well as the conditions for the
possibility of knowledge discovery and creation

Enablement activities include:
– instilling a knowledge vision
– managing conversations
– mobilizing knowledge activists
– creating or developing the right context
– globalizing local knowledge
These activities however belong more to the management sphere (K of M),
which we will address shortly.
[Von Krogh, G., Ichijo, K., Nonaka, I. (2000): Enabling Knowledge Creation. Oxford
Univ. Press. ]
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Tacit, Explicit and Cultural
Knowledge



Cultural knowledge is a special case that could be tacit or
explicit knowledge or on a range between them.
It manifests the organization´s self-understanding in terms of
values, beliefs, practices, etc. It may be fully articulate or
unarticulated (e.g., the employee implicitly knows what are
the appropriate clothes to wear to work or is told to read and
follow the mission statement of the organization).
Chun Wei Choo characterizes it as “the shared assumptions
and beliefs about an organization´s goals, capabilities,
customers, competitors. These beliefs are used to assign
value and significance to new information and knowledge.”
(Chun Wei Choo, Information Management for the Intelligent Organization, (Medford, NJ: ASIS&T,
2002), p. 264)
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Competitive intelligence, Business
intelligence and/or Social intelligence1



KM practitioners are also concerned with environmental
scanning for the organization, focused on the following:
competitive intelligence, business intelligence and social
intelligence
Competitive Intelligence includes both the analysis of
competitors and the competitive conditions in particular
industries or regions.
Bernhardt characterizes it as “an analytical process that
transforms disaggregated competitor, industry and market
data into actionable, strategic knowledge about the
competitor’s capabilities, intentions, performance and
position.”2
1Chun
Wei Choo, Information Management for the Intelligent Organization (Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2002), pp. 88ff.
C. Bernhardt, “I Want It Fast, Factual, Actionable,” Tailoring Competitive Intelligence to Executives’ Needs, Long Range Planning
27, 1 (Feb. 1994): 13.
2Douglas
47
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Competitive intelligence, Business
intelligence and/or Social intelligence1


48

Business intelligence, broader in scope than
competitive intelligence, monitors the environment
for information that is relevant to the strategic and
tactical decision-making process of an
organization.
Social intelligence, still broader in scope, “is
concerned with the capability of society and
institutions to identify problems, collect relevant
about these problems, and transmit, process,
evaluate and ultimately put this information to
use.” Such information may be important to an
organization’s or nation’s objectives.1
1Choo,
p. 87
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Intelligence, Overload and
Undersupply
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49
In any business, retrieving the right information or those who have the expertise to provide the
information is critical for any intelligence practice.
But Joseph Calo, the Director of the Institute of Competitive Intelligence at the University of
Ottawa, makes the following claim:
–
80% of what is collected in files is never used and “nobody knows where the other 20 per
cent of information is filed.”
–
At the same time, 150 hours on the average are spent per person per year looking for that
20 per cent of information. What does it all mean? We’re all librarians” (in Denise
Deveau, “No Brain, no gain: Knowledge Management,” Compuitng Canada (May 10,
2002), v28, i10, p. 14)
–
He hopes that technologies, developed by such companies as Gavagai Technology, Inc.
or Nstein Technologies, that do automatic indexing in a way similar to humans –
understanding something of the linguistic structure of the documents – will alleviate some
of these problems. French Caldwell, Gartner’s KM expert, is not so sure: “A lot of autoindexing and automatic classification features offered in products just aren’t that good,
You need people whose job is to classify information You need to find ways for people to
collect information in the process of doing their work without their having to think about it.
[Chritsina Coleman, “Knowledge management in action: Gartner’s KM expert, French
Caldwell, discuss best (and worst) practices in knowledge management,” e-Business
Advsor, July 2002, v20 15 p12(3).]
Not to mention undersupply – what never makes it into a file, whether content or expertise
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Organizational Learning
Another key dimension – implied in previous slides -- to KM is organizational
learning, which involves a continuous assessment of organizational
experience, including that of communities of practice, and converting that
experience into knowledge and making it accessible to the organization as a
whole, as long as it is relevant to the organization’s core goals and
objectives. According to KM Quick, A KM Tool for Government Practitioners
(http://www.km.gov, accessed 10/1/02 ) organizational learning has the
following characteristics:
1. “Although individual learning may benefit an organization, organizational
learning differs from individual learning which may improve only the
individual’s knowledge of, and capacity to act either in their personal or work
environment.
2. Organizational learning is a collective process dependent on interactions
and the learning from inter-relationships. It comes from the synergy of
healthy interactions between employees.
3. Organizations with a learning focus and knowledge creating organization are
continually improving their capacity for analysis, decision-making, and
action.”
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Knowledge Management
Professionals


Information professionals that create, convert, maintain, store
and retrieve these knowledges in an organization and
promote organizational learning, are ‘knowledge
professionals’ or ‘knowledge management professionals
Their activities include:
–
–
–
–
–
51
creating directories of individuals with expertise in the
organization;
codifying, classifying, storing and providing access mechanisms
to knowledge;
recording and making accessible the organization’s history and
accomplishments
transforming the knowledges (e.g., latent to explicit) and
disseminating them
doing environmental scanning
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Management of Knowledge (M of K)


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52
Up to this point, the focus has been on what is managed –
knowledge, but the management dimension began to surface.
Knowledge managers manage knowledge, but managing
knowledge(M of K) and managing people(K of M) may involve
different talents and proclivities. Not only that, how many
skills can a KM acquire? While he/she may not have detailed
knowledge of all of these things, he/she has to know enough
to direct the knowledge workers who manage such
processes?
Now we focus on the management dimension, though we
have already suggested that one of the roles of the
knowledge manager is to enable the conditions for
knowledge creation and discovery.
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KM: Focus on Management –
Roles of the Knowledge Manager


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53
Manages and empowers organizational members
– Those who carry out the KM activities
– Those who can contribute to KM activities
Provides leadership
– In knowledge management practices
– In ethical practices with respect to copyright, intellectual
property, copyright, and competitive intelligence
Sets the framework for information capital production
– Promotes techniques and technologies to capture tacit
knowledge, to capture and locate expertise (persons,
procedures, databases), to access best practices
– Manages and facilitates change
– Promotes conversation, the source of much innovation
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KM: Focus on Management –
Roles of the Knowledge Manager


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54
One must remember the critical role of conversation in the
creation of knowledge. Amrit Tiwana makes a powerful
observation when he says: “A good knowledge management
system lives and thrives on conversation. Free, unrestricted
and easy conversation must be supported. The medium itself
must not be a stricture.” (Amrit Tiwana, The Knowledge
Management Toolkit (New York: Prentice Hall, 1999)).
On the one hand we must not force all such conversations to
be recorded (that would be a stricture) and we must have
organizational practices and values to promote and reward
such activities, particularly when they are fruitful
In other words, people are the most critical resource for KM
and technologies should only be adopted if they support and
do not constrain KM activities
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KM: Focus on Management –
Roles of the Knowledge Manager

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55
Inaugurates, maintains and/or monitors communities of practice and/or
organizational units (in terms of KM activities).
– Sets goals and objectives
– Promotes TQM, discovers and promotes best practices and
procedures
– Rewards those gaining and exercising KM skills and engaging in KM
practices
– Provides incentives for resource sharing, curiosity and innovation
Sets standards for content interrogation (e.g., RDF, XML, etc.) so as to
access content from heterogeneous media (diverse systems, platforms,
sources)
Seeks the coordination and integration of information systems,
activities and environments and
Strives for a comprehensive information audit (realizing that it probably
cannot be done completely or that such a project is completely practical
or useful)
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Misperceptions of KM

To see it as a technology, but it is really a balance among technology, people
and processes. It is better seen as effective collaboration and knowledge
sharing. Technologies, however, are emerging that are helpful in improved
search and collaboration. French Caldwell argues that:
We are starting to see document management and portal vendors brining in more functionality such as
improved search and collaboration. This is resulting what we call a smart enterprise suite. These suites
will take care of about 80 percent of the technical functionality for about 80 percent of the enterprise. So,
you might find that were are still parts of the enterprise that require best-of-breed function, for example,
enhanced search or team collaboration. For 80 percent of the enterprise, you get most of the functionality
that you need in products from companies like HyperWave, Open Text, IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, and even
eRoom, which has its roots in collaboration. [Chritsina Coleman, “Knowledge management in action:
Gartner’s KM expert, French Caldwell, discuss best (and worst) practices in knowledge management,” eBusiness Advsor, July 2002, v20 15 p12(3).]

56
That all knowledge can be made explicit and it is the role of KM to do this.
Not all knowledge can be made explicit (expertise resides in the skills of the
person who possesses it) and choices have to be made about what is
important enough to make explicit, when it can. We want to codify the useful
20%, not aggravate the useless 80%.
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KM: Not so easy….


In the midst of this grand vision, we need to remember
some caveats:
Tom Davenport’s Ten Principles of KM include:
–
–
–
–
–
–
Knowledge is expensive (but so is stupidity!)
Effective management of knowledge requires hybrid solutions
of people and technology
Knowledge management is highly political
Sharing and using knowledge are often unnatural acts
Knowledge management benefits more from maps than
models, more from markets rather than hierarchies
Knowledge management never ends
[Thomas Davenport, “Some principles of Knowledge Management, “ available at:
http://www.bus.utexas.edu/kman/kmprin.htm, accessed September 24, 1999.]
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Successful KM: Objectives

58
Thomas Davenport, David De Long and Michael
Beers, some of the gurus in KM, identify 4 broad
objectives for KM:
1.
Create Knowledge Repositories
2.
Improve Knowledge Access
3.
Enhance Knowledge Environment and
4.
Manage Knowledge as an Asset
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Create Knowledge Repositories
–
Create Knowledge Repositories, including the
following types:
external knowledge, e.g., competitive intelligence;
2. structured internal knowledge, e.g., research reports,
marketing materials, techniques and methods; and
3. informal internal knowledge, e.g., discussion
databases of “lessons learned”.
Procedures have to be installed for capturing significant
tacit knowledge
1.
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Improve Knowledge Access
Devise techniques for access to
knowledge and for facilitating transfer
among individual employees
 Use metadata and other intellectual
technologies to improve access
 Use technologies that facilitate
collaboration and transfer.

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Enhance the Knowledge
Environment


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61
Create an environment conducive to more
effective knowledge creation, transfer and use.
This usually means changing the
organizational culture, especially norms and
values.
Encourage and reward knowledge-related
behavior on the part of employees
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Manage Knowledge as an Asset
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62
E.g., include it as another asset on the balance
sheet, in order to enhance investors’
appreciation of a company’s knowledge assets
Focus on assets related specifically to
knowledge and use them to increase the return
on investment
Measure knowledge assets and strive to make
them part of the accounting operations of a
company
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The Knowledge Management Cycle
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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Create knowledge
Capture knowledge
Refine knowledge
Store knowledge
Manage knowledge
Disseminate knowledge
Eliminate knowledge
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Benefits of KM
•
Reduction in loss of intellectual capital when people leave the company
•
Reduction in costs by decreasing the number of times the company must
repeatedly solve the same problem
•
Economies of scale in obtaining information from external providers
•
Reduction in redundancy of knowledge-based activities
•
Increase in productivity by making knowledge available more quickly &
easily
•
Increase in employee satisfaction by enabling greater personal development
and empowerment
•
64
Strategic competitive advantage in the marketplace
[Source: http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/yele/Course/IS404/Lecture-slides/IS-404class7-1.ppt, accessed 11/3/03].
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KM Information Professionals
TFPL, Ltd suggest three wide areas of KM professionals:
1.
KM Planners and Facilitators
A team whose roles include working with or as directors,
managers; content structuring; IT tools; knowledge network;
human resources; project management; external information
strategies; internal marketing of KM concepts; help desk;
design of KM and information training
2. KM Practitioners
knowledge leaders; knowledge managers; knowledge
navigators; knowledge synthesizers; content editors;
publishers (e.g., of content on Intranet); coaches and
mentors; help desk functionaries
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KM Information Professionals
3. Enterprise-wide Workers whose roles include:
– making decisions at the corporate level
– strategic planning, competitive intelligence*
Providing for such diversity in an educational program would seem too
ambitious, even granting that such diverse roles are useful in the
knowing organization.
The real proof of the pudding is whether job advertisements appear in
the classified ads with such titles.
It is doubtful that Kent State University will provide such diversity in
KM professionals in the marketplace.
At the moment it is more useful, practical to focus on the management
and knowledge roles, and let the subroles sort themselves out by
themselves.
*[Skills for Knowledge Management: A Briefing Paper by TFPL on behalf of the Library
and Information Commission, July, 1999].
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KM Learning Objectives
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67
To understand the value that KM provides an organization at the
operational, strategic or tactical level and devise metrics to assess it
(measuring the cost of producing it and its value)
To have knowledge of and capabilities in business or organizational
management practices, policies and procedures
To understand and have competencies in KM systems, policies,
practices, and procedures
To have the ability inaugurate processes and procedures to extract
tacit and latent knowledge (when possible)
To have the ability to produce, maintain and disseminate
competitive, business and social intelligence
To foster communities of practice and cull best practices from them
To have the ability to produce, maintain and sustain other data,
information or knowledge and their systems that would facilitate the
decision-making abilities of an organization
To make such knowledges available across time, space and place,
under secure conditions
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KM Learning Objectives

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68
To have knowledge of and competencies in knowledge
creation, collaboration, sharing, use and reuse
To have competencies in intellectual technologies, such as
taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies for knowledge-based
systems; indexing and metadata practices; standards for
knowledge-sharing across systems, networks and platforms
(e.g., XML, RDF, topic maps, etc.)
To know how to provide incentives or rewards for KM
activities and to promote a culture of sharing, to the greatest
extent possible
To have understanding of barriers to KM activities and what
can and cannot be resolved
To have competencies in knowledge needs assessment
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KM Learning Objectives

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69
To understand current and emerging information/knowledge
technologies, how to evaluate them in terms of organizational
needs and constraints, and how to implement them
To know how to design, create, develop, sustain or tap
communities of practice and interest for KM activities and
best practices.
To understand and implement ethical and legal standards and
practices
To know how to set KM goals and activities for organizational
units
To promote individual (self-directed) and organizational
learning
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Frid Framework for Enterprise
Knowledge Management
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70
As a summary, I would recommend Dr. Randy J. Frid’s Frid
Framework for Enterprise Knowledge Management: A Common KM
Framework for the Government of Canada (New York: iUniverse,
Inc., 2004), who makes some of the following observations about
KM:
Knowledge Management is not Information Management because IM
delivers information, and KM helps manage what people do with the
information. (p. 2).
Knowledge management is not technology, it is management: e.g.
to enhance decision-making, identify islands of knowledge and build
bridges between them. (pp. 2-3)
KM is not about leadership (inspired and inspiring individuals which
employees would follow) but about management. Management is
sustainable, repeatable and measurable, while leadership is
generally unique. Both are needed in an organization (p. 8)
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What Organizations Need to
Manage (Frid)

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71
“Whether people are asking the right questions
What people know
What people don’t know
How to best leverage people’s knowledge
How to convince people to share knowledge
How to map what people know to a business process
How to fill knowledge gaps
How to capture and codify unique knowledge
How to prevent knowledge loss unless such a loss is ‘planned abandonment’
To whom or what to turn when people need to fill a knowledge gap
How to get people the knowledge they need, when they need it
How to repair knowledge processes when they fail
How to institutionalize successful knowledge processes
How to capture and advocate lessons learned and best practices
How to value unique and proprietary corporate knowledge” (p. 5)
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KM: A Game Plan (Frid)

Step 1: Adopt a framework (illustration 1)
–
–
–
–
–
72
Protect and grow known intellectual assets
Identify change agents
Define change agenda (infrastructure to support KM initiatives)
Perform diagnostics and implement solutions (repeatable and
sustainable KM initiatives
Outcomes: discovery, creation and protection of intellectual
assets are all potential outcomes of the framework (illustration
2).
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KM Game Plan (Frid)


75
Step 2: Perform a maturity baseline – one
must know the organization’s current position
so that its growth can be measured
Step 3: Establish a knowledge management
office (KMO): Ilustration 3
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KM Game Plan (Frid)
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77
Define a KM roadmap (illustration 4)
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KM Game Plan (Frid)

Build a centralized KM toolbox. This would include:
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
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A KM framework guide
KM policies
A KM maturity model
A KM analysis process
KM best practices
KM lesson learned
A KM discussion form
A KM document repository
KM contacts
KM risk-, issue- and opportunity-management tools
KM links
KM guides and training materials
KM templates
Km presentation materials (pp. 15-16)
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KM Game Plan (Frid)
Step 5: Perform diagnostics and implement
solutions. (p. 16)
I would encourage your reading his text: it
provides a succinct, intelligent and actionable
framework.
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For information and suggestions:




Please contact me if you are interested in KM, IA or IU. Survey?
Click on http://iakm.kent.edu/
Or send email to: tfroehli@kent.edu
Or use snail mail:
Thomas J Froehlich, Ph.D., Director
Information Architecture and Knowledge Management
Kent State University
316 Library
PO Box 5190
Kent OH 44240
(330) 672-2782 (O)
(330) 678-7600 (H)
(330) 328-5280 (Cell)
(330) 672-7965 (Fax)
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