2008-1-24 14:03:28
[转帖]The Seven Steps to Knowledge Management
Electronic Business StrategiesDavid Yockelson
Increasing interest in knowledge management (KM) will force organizations to revisit the several basic principles and questions that were largely ignored during the previous KM initiatives three to four years ago. Although most organizations appear to be approaching KM more intelligently, a —plan of attack“ must still be created to win support (both people and budget).
As many organizations attempt to recover from the economic recession, they often realize they have had no KM strategy or, more precisely, no means of collecting best practices and experience from now-departed employees. In addition, HR functions within certain verticals in our client base have conducted surveys noting that significant portions of staff will diSAPpear (mostly through retirement) during the next few years, forming an additional KM impetus. Certainly, conditions are now ripe for a KM resurgence, an often-impossible dream for organizations three to four years ago that were just beginning to traverse —hockey stick“ curves of production and performance. These days, KM is being viewed as a capability that will help —right the ship“ and provide a basis for maintaining knowledge and experience that can prevent intellectual shrinkage and enable organizations to maintain status quo. This contrasts slightly with prior KM endeavors, in which the focus was often to innovate more effectively. This time, KM is defensive rather than offensive.
That said, organizations cannot afford to make the same mistakes now with KM that they did several years ago. Fortunately, most organizations recognize and respect the cultural and organizational components of KM, though establishing metrics and incentives can still be challenging (and most organizations have largely given up on the metrics piece of this). Still, creating a KM strategy that does not begin and end with a technical architecture (see Figure 1) is imperative, and we believe organizations are beginning to understand how to do this. By 2005/06, KM capabilities and culture will be ingrained within the technical and organizational fabrics of 90%+ of Global 2000 (G2000) firms, though the technical definitions will vary somewhat. By that point, participation (contribution, attribution, and usage) will be seamless endeavors linked closely to employees and customer, partner, and supplier processes.
Creating the Knowledge Management Strategy
Several steps must be taken when creating a KM strategy; these are as follows:
1. Defining KM in the organization‘s terms: Each organization must first figure out what KM means to it, realizing the definition can take several forms. It can mean retention of best practices, it can mean e-learning, or it can represent a much higher-level focus on innovation as well as employee or customer satisfaction. It may also relate to all these, a key concept for other components. This first step, useful for creating a common lingo and conceptual base, will be accomplished in roughly 30% of the G2000 by 2004 (meaning that by 2005/06, there will still be more technically focused and tactical KM implementations than strategic enterprise initiatives).
META Trend: By 2003/04,
knowledge management (KM) will be ingrained as a set of operational principles, practices, and technologies in more than 90% of Global 2000 organizations. Most KM efforts will rely on enterprise portals to combine unstructured content,structured data, e-learning facilities, and skill/expertise selection and management within the context of business processes.
2. Determining business need/requirements: A critical step is to scour the organization for requirements. Although we recommend that KM start at a functional or specific process level, the approvals required to implement behavioral change (let alone purchase technology) suggest that organizations find as many KM "opportunities“ as possible and then select those that are either feeling the most pain or grant the greatest return. We believe such tactical initiatives will continue to drive KM for the foreseeable future versus the rarer (10% of G2000 by 2005) enterprise KM undertaking.
3. Translating to benefits: Once the situations are found, translating the opportunity to business benefits is critical to begin selling the concept to managers (or those controlling the budget or holding the reins). This is once again done at the function/process level, making business benefits for KM tangible and apparent, as well as making methods to undertake KM somewhat more identifiable.
4. Understanding potential payback in dollars, where applicable: Realizing that much of KM‘s ROI is related either to productivity (i.e., it has an indirect impact on the bottom line) or strategic benefit (good business case, poor ability to quantify – e.g., reduced employee churn), organizations must work to establish the monetary benefits. Fortunately, good evidence of ROI across the KM technology spectrum exists, and certain implementation types (e.g., expertise automation) have already proven significant ROI, but we believe many KM efforts will be approved without such rigor, especially given the previously alluded-to HR realities.
5. Creating functional requirements: How the KM capabilities will function (general capabilities, usage, etc.) is now the key component and the first place to really understand or introduce technology. In each specific area, functional requirements should be recorded, though organizations should also continue to centralize these requirements (with the ultimate goal of aggregated and shared services efficiency). Conversations with IT groups, various users, etc. are imperative here.
6. Selecting technology(ies) to farm, buy, and deliver: Once requirements are understood, technologies and products can be selected. Which ones will depend on several factors: the main focus of the effort (project management, document management, etc.). Organizations must realize there is no single KM —thing“ to purchase (though there are several comprehensive environments – notably from Intraspect, Open Text, Lotus/IBM, and a few others), even though some organizations define KM as just document management (which is acceptable, unless more is expected/required), for example. Existing capabilities (e.g., from Lotus Domino, Microsoft Exchange, and Documentum) should be examined first for use in these new scenarios, and portal framework deployments must be taken into consideration simultaneously with KM endeavors (because the portal is fast becoming the primary aggregation and contextual delivery mechanism for KM).
7. Maintaining and socializing KM metrics and best practices: Once these decisions are made and the application put into place, doing —KM for KM“ is important, if only to socialize or market the notions across the organization. Socialization could include news briefs on the intranet, —lunch and learn“ sessions, Webinars throughout the organization, naming contests, etc. Best practices should be captured and shared (e.g., taxonomy building). When possible, metrics should be captured, and although we believe a small percentage of implementations will have some method of doing this (<10% by 2003, <30% by 2005) built in, most will have to do this anecdotally.
Taking these steps does not guarantee success (due to the psychology of collaboration, willingness to contribute and perhaps tag data, etc.), but it will provide a guide for senior executives to understand both the value and the impact so that they support it.
Bottom Line
KM strategy, more well-defined than several years ago, is not intangible, and steps taken early toensure understanding of KM value will help guarantee its success later.
Business Impact: A sound KM strategy, pinpointing business benefit/impact as well as ROI (in addition to technological choices) is the primary means of gaining broad acceptance of such aninitiative across the organization (and even for many tactical deployments), particularly when executives must buy in.
Addendum
Figure 1 – A Knowledge Management Architecture
Although loosely defined as an architecture, the following are the most likely (and most needed) technologies to include in a broad KM technology strategy:
. Search/retrieval
.Categorization/taxonomy management
.Expertise automation
.Document management
.Web content management
.Collaboration (synchronous and asynchronous)
.Portal framework
.E-learning (close proximity)
Source: META Group
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