KM practices

Which KM practices are the most important in your opinion?

I've been giving this some thought and have this short list:

Facilitate conversations - this is where connections are made, trust is built, new knowledge emerges. Fostering deep dialog, creating a meeting space to surface issues, heighten awareness, exchange ideas, increase understanding and deepen learning is a critical first step. This can develop into a community of practice, an informal center of excellence, a Q&A forum or a below the radar think-tank.

Enable connections - publish contact lists, attribute content, include informal channels such as IM, cell phone, Skype and e-mail addresses.  Find ways to make people aware of the skills, interests, experiences and networks of others.  Being aware of the competencies and backgrounds of possible team / group members is a critical part of making KM happen.

Support knowledge sharing - get leaders to walk the talk, seed forums with 5-7 active contributers, encourage self-publishing via blogs & wikis. This is not about providing incentives, but about tapping the intrinsic interests, learning desires and identity building  aspirations of staff.

Provide mentors - to help with technology, make social introductions, encourage content development and assist with establishing conversations & connections. There is nothing more powerful than having a trusted confidant who can show you the ropes, help you avoid cultural clashes, point you to accepted norms and steer you to people that matter.

Clarify meaning - help groups surface distinctions, maintain diversity and engage in creative abrasion, i.e. create a Ba. Here we are talking about applying knowledge practices to improve innovation, helping to build a common language, leveraging group communication, building and testing advanced concepts.

If you wish to move to advanced KM practices, consider forming a pattern community to capture experience, record repetitive associations and surface pitfalls to avoid.

http://kmwiki.wikispaces.com/Pattern+promises

Please notice information related activities have been left out - tagging, repositories, launching software, building search abilities, content structuring.....

I'm wondering what your key Knowledge Management practices really are?

Comments

[David Locke]

Shawn, they are HR practices not KM practices. If by KM practices, you mean those defined by the people who write books on what they think KM is, then ok. But, none of that is actually KM.

IT systems, libraries, blogs, wikis, etc.... Do not have much to do with knowledge. As used here and by other KM gurus, KM is nothing but a buzzword. No facilitation of knowledge capabilities actually takes place by performing KM practices, as these practitioners define them.

The business value of knowlege is nearly gone by the time knowledge is made explicit by these practices. There are other practices which capture knowlege while it still has great value, but these are not those.

[David Locke]

Claifying meaning and integrating meaning are different things. The former significant. That latter deadly. Meanings don't integrate. They get destroyed.

So part of the social constructionist aspects will destroy knowledge if it means trimming the ontological tree. A customer will never mean the same thing to the practitioners of sales and the practitioners of marketing. And, they are not supposed to be the same thing. Talk about it all you want. But, you would be better off firing the capability that doesn't use your definition. Because you will destroy the capability nonetheless. Particularly, if you are working towards IT integration, the worst kind.

In Dialogue the Art of Talking, the process of dialogue climbs the tree to find the universals to agree on, rather than triming the tree. Conversatiions are not necessarily dialogue. Conversations are not conducted in a power-free zone. Meaning is held by power.

[lars]

Responding to Shawn, here - ( here from norway) since i would love to learn more - as far as your perspective of KM goes!

Self am still in the realm where herding a dozen cats, is ( or must be) far easier than "managing knowledge..."
Thank you!

"Actually, none of the listed activities constitute knowledge managment. They constitute content doing, but that is weak explicit knowledge and certainly not management."

[Shawn]

I read the list and thought they were all good examples of KM practices. You might be interested in this study Grey: Tarmizi, Halbana, Gert-Jan de Vreede, and Ilze Zigurs. 2006. Identifying challenges for facilitation in communities of practice. In 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Hawaii: IEEE.

In it they list what practitioners think are important practices and difficult ones. Here is a list based on their work that I have been working on with Nancy White for a client (with a CoP focus):

* Creating and maintaining an open, positive, and participative environment
* Building cooperative relationships among members
* Mediating conflicts within the community
* Defining the domain and what is outside the community's scope
* Keeping community focus on its purpose
* Promoting ownership and encouraging group responsibility

# Developing and asking good questions
# Encourageing new members to participate in the community's activities
# Listening, clarifying and integrating information
# Selecting, launching and stewarding useful tools and practices (i.e. tools and ways to capture artifacts from meetings, for phone conference calls, co-editing, tagging, blogging for knowledge sharing, community project management, etc.)
# Encouraging mulitple perspectives
# Using frameworks to evaluate the health of the community

[David Locke]

Actually, none of the listed activities constitute knowledge managment. They constitute content doing, but that is weak explicit knowledge and certainly not management.