1. Knowledge Management
Basics
Stan Garfield
July 2017

2. What is Knowledge Management?
• Knowledge Management is the art of transforming information and
intellectual assets into enduring value for an organization’s clients
and its people.
• The purpose of knowledge management is to:
o Foster the reuse of intellectual capital
o Enable better decision making
o Create the conditions for innovation
• KM provides people, processes, and technology to help
knowledge flow
o To the right people
o At the right time
o So they can act more efficiently and effectively
2

3. 5 Ways to Do Knowledge Management
1. Share what you have learned, created, and proved
2. Innovate to be more creative, inventive, and imaginative
3. Reuse what others have already learned, created, and proved
4. Collaborate with others to take advantage of what they know
5. Learn by doing, from others, and from existing information
3

4. 4
15 Benefits of Knowledge Management
1. Enabling better and faster decision making
2. Making it easy to find relevant information and resources
3. Reusing ideas, documents, and expertise
4. Avoiding redundant effort
5. Avoiding making the same mistakes twice
6. Taking advantage of existing experience
7. Communicating important information widely and quickly
8. Promoting standard, repeatable processes and procedures
9. Providing methods, tools, templates, techniques, and examples
10.Making scarce expertise widely available
11. Showing customers how knowledge is used for their benefit
12.Accelerating delivery to customers
13.Enabling the organization to leverage its size
14.Making the organization's best problem-solving experiences reusable
15.Stimulating innovation and growth

5. 5
10 Knowledge Management Strategies
1. Motivate: communicate, model, set goals, recognize, reward
2. Network: connect, cross organizational boundaries, collaborate, build
communities, converse, tell stories, meet in person
3. Supply: databases, skills inventories, document repositories
4. Analyze: verification, distillation, harvesting, lessons learned, proven
practices, sense-making, social network analysis, positive deviance
5. Codify: consolidate, collate, integrate, value, tag, refine, standardize
6. Disseminate: distribute, publish, syndicate, aggregate, personalize
7. Demand: just-in-time KM, expertise location, ask the expert, search,
user assistance, e-learning, threaded discussions, appreciative inquiry
8. Act: decision making, proven practice replication, process
improvement, embedding in workflow, responding, answering, reusing
9. Invent: create, develop, innovate, transform, stimulate, rethink, imagine
10. Augment: cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, intelligent
personal assistants, virtual reality

6. 6
5 Modes of Knowledge Flow
1. Collection: processes and repositories for capturing explicit
knowledge.
2. Connection: collaboration, communities, and social networks for
sharing tacit knowledge.
3. Boundary spanning: bridges across organizational boundaries for
enabling knowledge to flow between previously-isolated groups.
4. Discovery: processes for learning from existing sources of
information, including systems, databases, and libraries.
5. Creation: processes for stimulating innovation and facilitating
invention.

7. 7
1. Getting senior leaders to provide funding, demonstrate support, and lead by example.
2. Balancing people, process, and technology components — not focusing on rolling out
tools.
3. Delivering tangible business benefits that support organizational objectives and
priorities.
4. Motivating people to share, innovate, reuse, collaborate, and learn.
5. Establishing a vision for how knowledge management should work, and relentlessly
working towards making that vision a reality by implementing, improving, and iterating.
6. Defining compelling use cases clearly showing the advantages over existing
alternatives, and answering the question “what’s in it for me?”
7. Getting people to openly ask for help.
8. Making useful information easily findable.
9. Connecting people to each other so they can help each other at the time of need.
10. Improving decisions, actions, and learning.
11. Focusing on a few initiatives, setting a few simple goals, and not trying to tackle
everything possible.
12. Delivering what people want and the organization needs, not what is trendy.
13. Communicating by pull and opt-in, not by push.
14. Augmenting and automating processes using analytics, cognitive computing, and
related techniques.
15. Integrating knowledge management into existing processes, workflows, and systems so
that it is not perceived as extra work or yet another tool to have to learn and use.
15 Key Issues in KM

8. 8
A Vision for Knowledge Management
1. People, process, and technology elements are in place to enable everyone to conveniently Share,
Innovate, Reuse, Collaborate, and Learn
2. A single global platform is available, with access to community sites, websites, team sites, content
repositories, and collaboration tools
3. Everyone can interact with the platform in the ways they prefer, including entirely by email, mobile
client, desktop client, web browser, RSS feed, etc.
4. Global, cross-functional communities are available for each major specialty, role, and focus area,
and they offer a site, a calendar, frequent events, useful news and content, and active discussions
5. Everyone belongs to at least one community, including the one most closely aligned to their work,
and pays attention to the community's discussions and activities
6. Anyone needing help, an answer to question, content, an expert, or information on what the firm
has done and can do can post in a community discussion board or the enterprise social network
and receive a helpful reply within 24 hours
7. Everyone can easily find, follow, be made aware of, and share what is going on in the enterprise
social network, activity stream, blogosphere, content repositories, etc.
8. People are recognized, rewarded, and promoted if they Share, Ask, Find, Answer, Recognize,
Inform, and Suggest, and leaders set a good example by doing so themselves
9. What one part of the firm knows, the rest of the firm knows; different parts of the firm routinely work
together; ideas are solicited and implemented; high levels of trust and transparency exist;
leadership engages with all levels of the firm's members; people interact with people they didn't
know before; and individuals learn effectively
10. Decisions are made quickly and effectively, it's easy to find information and resources, open
communications are made frequently and widely, redundant effort is avoided, mistakes are not
repeated, scarce expertise is made widely available, clients see how knowledge is used for their
benefit, sales and delivery are accelerated, innovation and growth are stimulated, morale is high,
and the firm's reputation is strong; as a result, the firm thrives

9. 100 Knowledge Management Specialties
1. Sharing, culture, organizational design, and change management
2. Innovation, invention, creativity, and idea generation
3. Reuse, proven practices, lessons learned, and knowledge retention
4. Collaboration and communities
5. Learning, competency development, and training
6. Goals, measurements, incentives, gamification, recognition, and rewards
7. Social networks, organizational networks, value networks, and network analysis
8. Expertise location and personal profiles
9. Communications
10. Facilitation and knowledge transfer
11. User support and Knowledge-Centered Support
12. Content management, document management, and records management
13. Analytics, text analytics, visualization, metrics, and reporting
14. Project management, process management, Agile development, workflow, planning, decision making, and
checklist
15. Knowledge audit, knowledge mapping, knowledge modeling, peer assist/retrospect, After Action Review,
sensemaking, and ritual dissent
16. Appreciative inquiry, positive deviance, and Most Significant Change
17. Storytelling, narrative, anecdote circles, BarCamp/unconference, and World Café
18. Information architecture, usability, user interface, and user experience
19. Search, findability, taxonomy, ontology, metadata, tagging, and semantic web
20. Portals, intranets, and websites
21. Big data, databases, repositories, business intelligence, data warehouses, and data lakes
22. Competitive intelligence, customer intelligence, market intelligence, and research
23. Digital workplace, social business, and social media tools
24. Cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, and neural networks
25. Wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, and prediction markets9

10. 50 Knowledge Management Components
People
culture & values
knowledge managers
user surveys
social networks
communities
training
documentation
communications
Technology
Process
methodologies
creation
capture
reuse
lessons learned
proven practices
collaboration
content management
classification
metrics & reporting
management of change
workflow
valuation
social network analysis
appreciative inquiry &
positive deviance
storytelling, narrative, &
anecdotes
blogs
wikis
podcasts & videos
syndication & subscription
social software & media
external access/extranet
workflow applications
process/report automation
Incentive points tracking
e-learning
analytics & BI
cognitive computing
& AI
user assistance &
knowledge help
desk
goals & measurements
incentives & rewards
user interface, UX, & usability
intranet
team spaces
virtual meeting rooms,
web/video/ audio conferencing, &
teleprescence
portals & digital workplace
repositories & knowledge bases
threaded discussions & ESNs
expertise locators/ask the expert
metadata & tags
search engines/enterprise search
archiving/document management
& records
management
10

11. LinkedIn Posts https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/stangarfield

12. For additional information
Managing the ROI of
Knowledge
Management
(chapter author)
The Case against
ROI
Implementing
a Successful
KM Program
(author)
Successful Knowledge
Leadership:
Principles and Practice
(chapter author)
The Modern Knowledge
Leader:
A Results-Oriented
Approach
Gaining Buy-in for
KM (chapter
author) Obtaining
Support for KM:
The Ten
Commitments
Proven Practices for
Promoting a
Knowledge
Management
Program (author)
• Join the SIKM Leaders CoP http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/sikmleaders/
• Twitter @stangarfield
• Site http://sites.google.com/site/stangarfield/
• Implementing a Successful KM Program https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/implementing-
successful-km-program-100th-post-20-years-stan-garfield