Knowledge-at-work

The essence of KM?

A recent spurt of posts on the Act-km list, has respondents trying to define knowledge management in a single sentence that can be grasped by a 13 year old - quite a task.

I've been intrigued by the number of respondents who have (improved, better, faster, more correct...) problem solution, decision making, competitive position... and storing stuff in knowledge bases in their replies.

The key to KM  (to me) seems to be:

increasing awareness
Helping you (or your group) become aware of new things, changed situations, emergent players that may influence the domain you have chosen to work in.

fostering learning
assisting with making novel and useful connections between concepts, improving understanding and enabling environments for making and testing new insights.

supporting sense-making
KM needs to be proactive, help surface consequences, avoid past errors, generate worthwhile & inventive alternatives.

Decisions, solutions, agility, competitive advantage and other benefits follow from sustaining a questioning environment, encouraging creative abrasion & experimentation, promoting deep dialog and allowing space for learning from mistakes.

The essence of KM then lies deeper than pragmatics, it gets close to sustaining an environment, building trust, promoting continual inquiry and testing beliefs.

Capturing corporate memory

How do you best manage corporate memory when company size exceeds tribe level?

At Zipp we are crossing that threshold where personal contacts, passage talk, and informal communication no longer work. Our tacit knowledge is not openly visible, we are re-inventing key stuff, vital lessons learned are falling through the cracks and new insights are not being effectively integrated. We find new employees starting from scratch with little access to corporate lore, no way to ask the right questions or find the people who may 'know'.

We have tried wikis, threaded forums, public folders, a home-grown CMS using MySQL and comments within our ERP system - all with little sustained success.

In common with others, we have key insights locked in e-mail threads, useful ppt presentations and Word docs hidden on multiple hard drives, process dos and don'ts that are not updated, useful heuristics that walk with staff turnover, business intelligence that is gathered but not sifted, collated or dispersed, vendor and customer feedback that gets lost or never relayed.

I'm thinking we need to tighten up on documentation, agree on a corporate taxonomy, apply meta-data, tag key files, make related content visible via maps and browsing aids, move away from keywords to essential meta-concept tags, enable & allow object annotation, notification & alerts, promote PKM and 'voicing', encourage and capture dialog, listen & report weak signals.

HOW ?