Such systems also often have a feature by which the requester can flag the request as a priority, and the system can then match high priority to high expertise rank.
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In the KM context, the emphasis is upon capturing knowledge embedded in personal expertise and making it explicit. The lessons learned concept or practice is one that might be described as having been birthed by KM, as there is very little in the way of a direct antecedent. Early in the KM movement, the phrase most often used was "best practices," but that phrase was soon replaced with "lessons learned. What might be a best practice in North American culture, for example, might well not be a best practice in another culture.
The major international consulting firms were very aware of this and led the movement to substitute the new more appropriate term. The idea of capturing expertise, particularly hard-won expertise, is not a new idea. Gathering military intelligence was the primary purpose, but a clear and recognized secondary purpose was to identify lessons learned, though they were not so named, to pass on to other pilots and instructors.
Navy Submarine Service, after a very embarrassing and lengthy experience of torpedoes that failed to detonate on target, and an even more embarrassing failure to follow up on consistent reports by submarine captains of torpedo detonation failure, instituted a mandatory system of widely disseminated "Captain's Patrol Reports.
The Captain's Patrol Reports, however, were very clearly designed to encourage analytical reporting, with reasoned analyses of the reasons for operational failure and success. It was emphasized that a key purpose of the report was both to make recommendations about strategy for senior officers to mull over, and recommendations about tactics for other skippers and submariners to take advantage of McInerney and Koenig, The military has become an avid proponent of the lessons learned concept. The phrase the military uses is "After Action Reports. There will almost always be too many things immediately demanding that person's attention after an action.
There must be a system whereby someone, typically someone in KM, is assigned the responsibility to do the debriefing, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to create the report, and then to ensure that the lessons learned are captured and disseminated. The experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria have made this process almost automatic in the military. The concept is by no means limited to the military. Larry Prusak maintains that in the corporate world the most common cause of KM implementation failure is that so often the project team is disbanded and the team members almost immediately reassigned elsewhere before there is any debriefing or after-action report assembled.
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Any organization where work is often centered on projects or teams needs to pay very close attention to this issue and set up an after-action mechanism with clearly delineated responsibility for its implementation. A particularly instructive example of a "lesson learned" is one recounted by Mark Mazzie , a well known KM consultant. The story comes from his experience in the KM department at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.
Wyeth had recently introduced a new pharmaceutical agent intended primarily for pediatric use. Wyeth expected it to be a notable success because, unlike its morning, noon, and night competitors, it needed to be administered only once a day, and that would make it much easier for the caregiver to ensure that the child followed the drug regimen, and it would be less onerous for the child.
Sales of the drug commenced well but soon flagged. One sales rep what the pharmaceutical industry used to call detail men , however, by chatting with her customers, discovered the reason for the disappointing sales and also recognized the solution. The problem was that kids objected strenuously to the taste of the drug, and caregivers were reporting to prescribing physicians that they couldn't get their kid to continue taking the drug, so the old stand-by would be substituted.
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The simple solution was orange juice, a swig of which quite effectively masked the offensive taste. If the sales rep were to explain to the physician that the therapy should be conveyed to the caregiver as the pill and a glass of orange juice taken simultaneously at breakfast, then there was no dissatisfaction and sales were fine. The obvious question that arises is what is there to encourage the sales rep to share this knowledge? The sales rep is compensated based on salary small , and bonus large. If she shares the knowledge, she jeopardizes the size of her bonus, which is based on her comparative performance.
This raises the issue, discussed below, that KM is much more than content management. The implementation of a lessons learned system is complex both politically and operationally. Many of the questions surrounding such a system are difficult to answer. Are employees free to submit to the system un-vetted? Who, if anyone, is to decide what constitutes a worthwhile lesson learned?
Most successful lessons learned implementations have concluded that such a system needs to be monitored and that there needs to be a vetting and approval mechanism for items that are posted as lessons learned. How long do items stay in the system? Who decides when an item is no longer salient and timely? Most successful lessons learned systems have an active weeding or stratification process.
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Without a clearly designed process for weeding, the proportion of new and crisp items inevitably declines, the system begins to look stale, and usage and utility falls. Deletion, of course, is not necessarily loss and destruction. Using carefully designed stratification principles, items removed from the foreground can be archived and moved to the background but still made available. However, this procedure needs to be in place before things start to look stale, and a good taxonomically based retrieval system needs to be created. These questions need to be carefully thought out and resolved, and the mechanisms designed and put in place, before a lessons-learned system is launched.
Inattention can easily lead to failure and the creation of a bad reputation that will tar subsequent efforts. Communities of practice emphasize, build upon, and take advantage of the social nature of learning within or across organizations. In small organizations, conversations around the water cooler are often taken for granted, but in larger, geographically distributed organizations, the water cooler needs to become virtual. Similarly, organizations find that when workers relinquish a dedicated company office to work online from home or on the road, the natural knowledge sharing that occurs in social spaces needs to be replicated virtually.
In the context of KM, CoPs are generally understood to mean electronically linked communities. Electronic linkage is not essential, of course, but since KM arose in the consulting community from the awareness of the potential of intranets to link geographically dispersed organizations, this orientation is understandable. A classic example of the deployment of CoPs comes from the World Bank. When James Wolfensohn became president in , he focused on the World Bank's role in disseminating knowledge about development; he was known to say that the principal product of the World Bank was not loans, but rather the creation of knowledge about how to accomplish development.
Consequently, he encouraged the development of CoPs and made that a focus of his attention. One World Bank CoP, for example, was about road construction and maintenance in arid countries and conditions. That CoP was encouraged to include and seek out not only participants and employees from the World Bank and its sponsored projects and from the country where the relevant project was being implemented, but also experts from elsewhere who had expertise in building roads in arid conditions, such as, for example, staff from the Australian Road Research Board and the Arizona Department of Highways.
This is also a good example of the point that despite the fact that KM developed first in a very for-profit corporate context, it is applicable far more broadly, such as in the context of government and civil society. The organization and maintenance of CoPs is not a simple or an easy task to undertake. As Durham points out, there are several key roles to be filled. She describes the key roles as manager, moderator, and thought leader.
They need not necessarily be three separate people, but in some cases they will need to be. Some questions that need to be thought about and resolved are:. KM was initially driven primarily by IT, information technology, and the desire to put that new technology, the Internet, to work and see what it was capable of. The concept of intellectual capital, the notion that not just physical resources, capital, and manpower, but also intellectual capital knowledge fueled growth and development, provided the justification, the framework, and the seed.
The availability of the internet provided the tool. As described above, the management consulting community jumped at the new capabilities provided by the Internet, using it first for themselves, realizing that if they shared knowledge across their organization more effectively they could avoid reinventing the wheel, underbid their competitors, and make more profit.
The central point is that the first stage of KM was about how to deploy that new technology to accomplish more effective use of information and knowledge. Problems and Failure Factors Too often, the effects of technology on the organization are not given enough thought prior to the introduction of a new system. The technical programming and design know-how Organizational know-how based on the understanding of knowledge flows The problem is that rarely are both these sets of knowledge known by a single person.
Building upon all this, and incorporating previously discussed elements, failure factors of knowledge management systems are as follows: Expecting that the technology is a KM solution in itself. Failure to understand exactly what the firm needs whether technologically or otherwise.
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Not understanding the specific function and limitation of each individual system. Lack of organizational acceptance, and assuming that if you build it, they will come — lack of appropriate organizational culture. Inadequate quality measures e. Is a system appropriate in one area of the firm but not another? Does it actually disrupt existing processes? Lack of understanding of knowledge dynamics and the inherent difficulty in transferring tacit knowledge with IT based systems see segment on tacit knowledge under knowledge sharing.
Lack of a separate budget. Promoting Acceptance and Assimilation According to Hecht et al. The resulting model organized the KMS implementation factors into the following categories: Innovation characteristics, fit, expected results, communication characteristics. Not influenced by design: Environment, technological infrastructure, resources, organizational characteristics.
Acceptance Influenced by design: Effort expectancy, performance expectancy. Social influences, attitude towards technology use. Management characteristics, institutional characteristics. To promote KMS adoption: Start with an internal analysis of the firm. These findings should form the basis of determining the systems needed to complement them. Evaluate existing work practices and determine how the systems will improve - and not hinder - the status quo.
One very interesting rule of thumb presented by Botha et al , is that "the more tacit the knowledge, the less high-tech the required solution". Each chapter concludes with discussion questions, review questions, and a vocabulary review. An Online Instructor's Guide is available. KM in Business Todd R. Database and Applications Security: Integrating Information Security and He is responsible for the identification of information access, retrieval and distribution needs while leading a consulting team in the design, implementation and integration of systems.