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Managing Organization’s Knowledge:
Basics of Knowledge Management
www.greenleafinstitute.com

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The Global Knowledge Economy
 3
forces are changing the rules of business and national
competitiveness at this moment :
 Globalization – Global reach of any companies with global
products
 Information/Knowledge Intensity – increase of knowledge
intensive business, more innovative products and services
 Networking and Connectivity – Social media, networked
forums

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New Business Ideas
 The rate of technological change has greatly increased over
the past thirty years.
 Advancement of technology, internal and mobile technologies
are transforming the economy with the vision of perfect
competition as a reality. And this pressure makes organizations
think of new business ideas ( heavily focusing on human
capital) as such:
 Change management
 Learning and unlearning
 Innovation & Creativity
 Knowledge Management

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New Business Ideas
 At present, organizations find it difficult to gain competitiveness
giving prime focus to all their tangible assets.
 It is now clear that organizations need a much broader range of
resources to be able to compete and succeed in the current
competitive market. This is proven by the fact that a majority of the
organizations are giving a lot of emphasis to their intangible
assets- knowledge, know-how, human capital’s skills and
experiences.
 Therefore, the need for lifelong learning- where individuals and the
organization as a whole need to learn on a continual basis and
respond differently to the market needs.

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What is Knowledge Management
(KM)
Knowledge Management, in short form, called, KM is a management
discipline that focuses on enhancing knowledge creation and
dissemination in an organization.
The idea is- leverage and use organizational knowledge assets to
enhance effectiveness and better decision making.
Gartner Group (1996) defined KM as “a discipline that promotes an
integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving
and sharing all of an enterprise’s information assets.
Delphi Consulting Group says, knowledge management is the
leveraging of the collective wisdom of people to increase
responsiveness and innovation.

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Why Managing Organization’s
Knowledge (1/2)
Effective management of knowledge can add value to an
organization in various ways :
 KM enables an organization to create, store, filter and
distribute structured and unstructured data and information
 KM helps organization for effective search of
information/documents and reduce time to retrieve the right
information.
 Sharing knowledge of past mistakes and lessons learnt can
help an organization to reduce duplication of work and make
better future decision.

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Why Managing Organization’s
Knowledge (2/2)
 Knowledge of best practices across the organization can
increase staff productivity, maintain standards, reduce the
learning curve of the new employees.
 KM helps the organization to locate the internal experts and
increase the transfer of knowledge.
 Knowledge management can improve customer satisfaction by
focusing and creating customer-preference database and share
the customer needs across the organization to provide better
services.
Organizations can increase the financial value by treating people’s
knowledge as an asset similar to traditional assets like inventory and capital
facilities.
--U.S Department of Navy, 2001

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The Knowledge Hierarchy
The data is assumed
to be simple isolated
High facts.
WISDOM
Value When such facts are
put into a context, and
KNOWLEDGE combined within a
Meaning
structure, information
emerges.
INFORMATION
When information is
given meaning by
Low interpreting
DATA it, information becomes
knowledge.

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Knowledge Types in the
Organization
Personal
Experiences Scientific
Formulas
Codes, Manuals
KNOWLEDGE Know-how
TYPES
Presentations
Reports
Financial Data Databases
Understandings Organizational
Insights Structure

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Knowledge Categories – I. Explicit
Knowledge and II. Tacit Knowledge
• Can be expressed
and shared in the
form of data,
Codes, Manuals scientific formula, Personal
Explicit
specification, and Experiences
such like.
Presentations
• Can be processed,
Reports transmitted and
stored relatively Know-how
easily.
Financial Info
KNOWLEDGE Insights
Databases
• Highly personal and
hard to formalize. Understandings
Tacit
Scientific • It is deeply rooted in
Formulas action, commitment,
ideas, values and
emotions.

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Knowledge Management Process
– 4 major activities
Knowledge Creation of new knowledge; best
Creation practices, innovation etc.
Categorization of knowledge (taxonomy),
Knowledge presentation of Knowledge ( portal,
Organization website)
Knowledge Face-to-face and online
knowledge sharing policies,
Sharing tools, processes
Usage of past knowledge to Knowledge
make new decisions, lessons
learnt are shared application

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Knowledge Management is the
Convergence of People, Process & Technology
PEOPLE
 Sharing/Attitudes PROCESS
 Culture  KM Roadmap
 Teamwork  Policies
 Motivation  Workflows
 Communities KM  Best Practices
 Standards  Business Intelligence
 Learning
TECHNOLOGY
 Databases KM is 80% people
 Data Mining related management
 Intranet/Groupware and 20% Technology
 Decision Support system management.
 Networks

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How to start a KM program in an
organization (1/4)
 Step 1- Identify what business/organizational problem(s)
Knowledge Management program is going to solve!
 Then align the knowledge management initiative with the overall
business goal.
 Step 2- Develop a business case for how the KM program is
going to address the specific problem that was identified in
step 1. This business case will help to generate management
buy in.
 Once management agrees with the initiative, a sponsor ( a high
level management official) will be identified who will oversee and
be accountable for the implementation of the program .

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How to start a KM program in an
organization (2/4)
 Step 3- Conduct a Knowledge Audit
 Knowledge audit will help to understand the critical knowledge need
to solve the identified problem ( step 1), where are those knowledge
currently located, who owns this knowledge. The audit will find out if
any critical knowledge is currently not available in the organization (
a knowledge gap) and how to find them ( by creating new
knowledge or partnering with external experts?)
 Step 4- Conduct a small-scale cultural audit
 The cultural audit will identify the various knowledge sharing culture
and behavior currently exists in the organization. Understanding
this culture will help to design the change management component
under the KM program.

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How to start a KM program in an
organization (3/4)
 Step 5- Develop a KM strategy based on the findings of the
knowledge audit Start with some quick wins
 The knowledge and cultural audit will figure out where to put the
focus- is it on the management and sharing of currently available
but distributed knowledge assets or creation of new knowledge?
KM strategy needs to be designed based on those findings.
 Step 6- Start with some quick wins
 Knowledge management is a difficult program as the ROI/Value
creation/Impact of the program really takes a long time to realize.
Therefore, it is important to come up with KM quick wins ( small
budget, short term, easily implementable yet good impact projects),
implement them and get everyone’s buy-in the organization.

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How to start a KM program in an
organization (4/4)
 Step 7- Develop a KM system, if not available
 A technology platform is important to store and share the critical
knowledge identified in step 1. The KM system can be developed in
stages- using the simplest tool available. Even e-mails can be
considered a good KM tool to start with. There are many open
source software currently available that can be used to store and
share knowledge assets.
 Step 8- Measure Performance
 A performance matrix needs to be developed to monitor the
implementation of the KM program as well as the value
creation/impact out of the program. Well defined performance
indicators will help the knowledge manager to keep track of the goal
of the program, i.e. solving the business problem ( step 1).

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Developing a KM Strategy (1/4)
 Scenario:
 Company A is a car manufacturing company. One of its business
/management problems that can be solved by KM intervention is-
many (45%) of the senior staff are retiring within next 5-6 years.
There is a huge influx of new, young staff in the company who are
not well-equipped with the right knowledge and skill to carry out
the task.
 The question is- how would a KM program address this
problem?
 After an initial knowledge audit the knowledge manager found
that much of the company’s valuable knowledge are not stored
and shared in a central location. He also did a cultural audit and
figures out that senior staff are not habituated to regularly share
their knowledge.

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Developing a KM Strategy (2/4)
 The KM strategic focus-
 The knowledge manager should focus on 2 areas in the
strategy-
I. How to collect, store and share those critical knowledge with
everyone in the organization
II. How to reduce the learning curve of the new staff
Development of projects to address both the areas has to be done
in stages.

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Developing a KM Strategy (3/4)
 The KM Projects
 To address the issue in area no. I- The knowledge manager
can do the following:
- Develop a simple KM system/platform
- Collect the knowledge assets from various sources
- Categorize them and upload accordingly
- Train people on how to use the system
- Develop policies on the usage
- Communicate regularly with the importance of the system to better
manage organizational knowledge

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Developing a KM Strategy (4/4)
 The KM Projects
 To address the issue in area no. II- The knowledge manager
can do the following:
- Introduce a Community of Practice ( CoP) program where the
senior staff act as mentors to the junior staff and share knowledge
- Announce Rewards and Recognition ( R&R) system- to motivate
people to share
- Expert knowledge transfer program- to capture critical knowledge
and experiences of the retiring senior staff through interviews,
discussion forum etc and share them with others by the KM system.

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Some KM tools (1/4)
 After Action Review
 After Action Review (AAR) is a tool to identify what has actually
happened in an activity. It is sort of quick reviewing the
performance and gap of any activities. There are normally 4
questions to ask in an AAR:
 What was supposed to happen/goals/objectives?
 What actually happened/real outcome?
 Is there any differences, why?
 What to learn from this action ?
 When to use- after any event, meeting, project or program;
with a group of people.

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Some KM tools (2/4)
 Storytelling
 Storytelling is about telling stories of the journey of an
organization/project or event. It is about sharing facts with
examples of real life experiences. Storytelling is a powerful tool as
it gives a human touch to the information sharing, rather than just
presenting data, reports.
 Storytelling can be used for many reasons, for example:
 To tell the staff about the success and failure of a project
 To convey the personal dexterity that the organization’s top
management had shown in dealing with a situation
 To engage staff in deep discussion on organization’s challenges and
opportunities.

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Some KM tools (3/4)
 Community of Practice
 Community of Practice , in short form, CoP is a group of people
who share a common business objective, passion about a subject
and who wants to connect with each other to enhance personal
knowledge and/or develop new organizational knowledge.
 Communities of Practice can be formal or informal.
 Formal CoPs are assigned with KPIs/deliverables by the
management and are officially formed with concrete goals and
roadmap.
 Informal CoPs are mostly formed by people who are interested to
deepen their knowledge in certain areas connecting with other
experts in the organization. Informal CoPs do not necessarily be
bonded with certain roadmap or goals.
 CoPs can be highly effective provided they have been designed
properly with reward mechanism.

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Some KM tools (4/4)
 Knowledge Café
 Knowledge café is a simple, relaxing method to conduct
business discussions, brainstorming. Like a Café setting,
knowledge café ( also called, World Café) invites participants to
sit in few circles to start a discussion topic. There is a facilitator,
who opens up the topic, explain the purpose of the café and rule
of discussion-
 Depending on the depth of the topic, a Knowledge Café can last
for hours. According to the rule set by the facilitator, there can
be breaks after every 20-30 minutes where the participants are
asked to change their 1st group and join another group. After 3-
4 rounds of breaks and changing of groups, participants are
advised to share the overall discussion findings to the entire
group. This process allows people to share their ideas with
almost everyone in the room.

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Knowledge Management
Useful links ….
 An interesting video on KM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM0G_WiN7vg
 Knowledge Management website- www.kmtalk.net
 Knowledge Management blog- www.kmtalk.net/blog

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THANK YOU.
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www.greenleafinstitute.com