AACS World Wide Web Pages
By Jean L. Graef
Knowledge management is at various stages of development in American businesses. Some companies are just taking their first steps toward identifying and organizing information resources. Others have already recruited a knowledge integrator and are looking to revamp and improve an established system.
The discrepancies were evident at a recent roundtable discussion we held, involving 20 people at 13 organizations. Concerns ranged from how to change staff information hoarding to information sharing, to what type of software and hardware is best for organizing data.
Participants represented a diversity of skills, experience and roles, including IT, human resources, content management, finance and strategic planning.
The early planners were most interested in: models or blueprints to guide subsequent development; changing corporate culture; measuring organizational impact; and standardizing the hardware, software and telecommunications infrastructure.
Dennis Fennessey, national director of client service technology at Deloitte & Touche, discussed the "push" † model of information flow. "Today, [Deloitte & Touche] is 80 percent pull; tomorrow, we'll be 80 percent push," he explained. According to Fennessey, the push model saves time by matching available information with individual interest profiles.
Many wanted to know how to capture tacit knowledge--the kind in peoples' heads--which is very hard to do, but has a very high payoff. Participants shared a variety of techniques to encourage experts to share their know-how, including competitive awards, cash bonuses, interviews and case-based reasoning.
Participants with knowledge management projects already in place wanted to: find software tools with better searching ability and response time; avoid legal pitfalls; classify information and improve navigation; roll out successful projects across the enterprise; and find, train and support people in new roles.
As knowledge bases grow and become more complex, knowledge managers such as Mitre Corp.'s Daryl Morey say they are spending more time creating and managing meta-information--subject headings, annotation and reader reviews--and testing visualization software such as KnowledgeX.
Discussion such as this provides better understanding of issues, tools and techniques and validates common struggles managers have in reaching their goals.
Graef is a principal of The Montague Institute, which offers educational and support services to management teams. She can be reached at jgraef@montague.com.
NOTE: The "push" technology refers to a form on information sharing where the information server uses a "profile"on each user (which may be built on the user's previous searches or types of documents he/she appears to desire or need) to "send" types of information the user presumably needs to know or would benefit from receiving. Thus, he/she need not continue to search for this information, it is automatically "pushed" their way when they log into the server. A "push" software package which operates within the intranet/extranet/Web site is required to accomplish this task.
AACS World Wide Web Pages