Knowledge management has long seemed worthy of the buzzword trash heap,
along with artificial intelligence and empowerment. Defining a
concept more than a technology, KM, as aficionados call it, has been slapped on
everything from groupware to document imaging and email programs.

Most practitioners agree that, simply put, KM is about getting the right information
to the right people when they need it. KM captures, stores, and distributes expertise
throughout an organization. It encourages people to share what they've learned.

Twenty-five percent of large global companies have a chief knowledge (or learning)
officer. Eighty percent of those companies have KM efforts, many of which are
succeeding, according to a survey of 200 senior executives released early this year by
the Conference Board in New York, N.Y.
In "Beyond Knowledge Management: New Ways to Work and Learn," Conference Board Program
Manager Brian Hackett writes that while technology makes KM possible, IT-centric
approaches to knowledge management typically fail.

Hackett identifies the following keys to successful knowledge management:

• The KM effort is mandated or initiated by top management
• The IT department builds the infrastructure, working in close partnership with
  the HR department, which drive the education and training
• Measurements of cooperation, sharing, and teamwork are built into performance
  appraisals and used as the main incentives, rather than money

The study names BP Amoco, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Ford, General Electric, IBM, Monsanto,
Steelcase, and Xerox as having effective CEO-led efforts to inculcate learning into
their corporate cultures. BP Amoco (London) attributed $260 million in bottom-line
savings to KM and the Dow Chemical Co. (Midland, Mich.) said it saved $40 million
a year by reusing patents.

In a phone interview, Hackett credited information technology with getting KM
started several years ago. At that time, he said, the focus was on building and
maintaining central repositories of information and installing groupware and
email. "The pendulum swung to where people realized it was more a cultural issue,"
Hackett says of KM. "At first, they (managers) thought that people don't want to
share. 'But over time' they've found that people generally do want to share."

Today, Hackett says, KM initiatives focus on creating "communities of practice" in
which the people responsible for certain business processes -- say, accounting or
product development -- can share information, talk, and listen. "The best piece of
knowledge-management technology is still the airplane," Hackett says half-facetiously.
In other words, dispersed or cross-functional teams need to meet in the same room on
occasion. "You've got to get people to trust each other," he adds.

Martha Tacy, KM product marketing director at http://www.lotus.com/home.nsf/welcome/km>Lotus Development (Cambridge, Mass.)
agrees: "We see KM as a byproduct of a collaborative environment."

Another key ingredient of today's KM is context, which means there is a shared
taxonomy understood by members of the practice community. It needn't be limited to a
company, says Priscilla Emery, senior vice president of information products and
services at AIIM International, a document-imaging
industry association in Silver Spring, Md. Emery says that Chevron (San Francisco) has
an arrangement with other petroleum companies to share know-how on wellhead
management. "They all share a common need to optimize how to fix certain types of
problems," she says. "They've saved millions of dollars in repair costs."

What holds such communities together, experts say, is groupware like Lotus Notes or
Microsoft's Exchange, or Web-based "teamware" products like Lotus's Teamroom and
OpenText's LiveLink. Most have a central document store or relational database, or a
distributed database that must be synchronized among users. Search software from such
vendors as
OpenText and Verity is a key component in accessing the database and building the
taxonomy. Document-management platforms from Documentum, FileNet, and others are
another common KM infrastructure, and data-mining tools often come into play.

Other popular applications, instead of forming the basis of KM, are being influenced
by it. Customer relationship management (CRM), which uses technology to put the right
information and personnel in touch with customers at critical moments, has obvious KM
characteristics. The same goes for business-to-business e-commerce systems, trading
exchanges, and extranets.

IBM's KM experience

One of the Conference Board's KM poster boys is Fred Schoeps, program director for
knowledge management at IBM in Armonk, N.Y. Schoeps leads other knowledge managers in
IBM divisions and practice communities around the world. He says the managerial push
for a KM initiative began around 1993, when Louis Gerstner joined as chairman and IBM
began to reengineer itself as a service company.

What stands out in a conversation with Schoeps is that he talks more about people
issues than technology. His list of vital KM ingredients is richest in learning and
community building. "The thing about knowledge management is, it starts with people,"
Schoeps says. In this view, Web-based distance-learning tools become a necessary part
of the KM infrastructure, as do tools that bring these knowledgeable people together in
virtual "e-spaces."

when asked to show quantifiable benefits from KM, Schoeps cites $200 million
saved in training costs through distance learning. "If you had no technology, you'd
send them to a classroom," he says. But isn't that just a benefit of computerization?
How can you credit it to KM? Schoeps responds that the distance-learning system was put
in place as part of IBM's KM initiative. The executives' KM philosophy drove the
management decision that made the IT investments happen.

As Schoeps and the other KM leaders put it: KM is a management thing.

Additional Resources

• Case
  Study: The CIA updates its knowledge management system
• Tom
  Davenport critiques the CIA’s new knowledge management system

» posted by abennett

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