Organizations invest in knowledge management (KM) -- the practice and process of identifying, capturing and leveraging organizational knowledge -- for two primary reasons:

• To improve their competitive advantage. Knowledge management champions believe that capturing and disseminating critical knowledge will enable employees to make the right decisions quicker, shorten sales cycles, speed up product launches, and create a consistent and high level customer experience.
  
  
• To manage the reality of the job market. Employees and employers have little loyalty these days. With employees often eager to switch organizations, employers ready to downsize at the sign of a bad quarter, and an aging population planning to retire soon, the prospect of organizational brain drain is continuous and real. While KM efforts cannot stop these trends, a KM initiative can hopefully mitigate the impact of these job market realities.
  

Focus on the KM4

The most effective KM systems make useful knowledge readily accessible to employees. The process and technology behind a KM project will differ by organization, but the same basic four principles will apply.

1. Develop measurable project goals. No project should get the green light unless the KM team can highlight business goals that are expected to be achieved. A project may eventually deliver more than promised, but it must, at the very least, create a core justification for its existence. This justification will not only drive initial budgets, but it will form the backbone for creating incentives for knowledge nugget (kn) contribution and create the metrics required for project auditing.
   
   
2. Create effective capture processes. The KM capture process must be user-friendly and mandatory. If the process is onerous, cumbersome, or unintuitive, users will avoid adding nuggets, add the bare minimum required, or simply fill up the KM database with substandard or unreliable kn data. While a voluntary or incentive-laden system sounds appealing, the reality is that participation must be mandatory; otherwise, employees will find valid and not so valid reasons for avoiding inputing nuggets.
   
   
3. Enable intuitive and integrated knowledge access. The KM database will store the nuggets, but the KM team should ensure that users are not limited to simply querying a database. While a central KM database (or knowledge base) will serve as the knowledge repository, the nuggets should be farmed out to a variety of systems and documents using automated technologies to ensure that the latest and most useful information is made available to users. Employees should gains access to kns that are integrated into CRM systems, queried through a KM database tool, and presented in various portals, FAQs, and email newsletters.
   
   
4. Audit the KM project. Did the project meet the goal? Has it delivered more benefits than initially planned? Auditing of a KM project can use hard, soft, or a combination of both types of metrics. Surveying users is also critical. KM auditors should remember that the silent majority -- those that don't tend to fill out forms or send in surveys -- are most likely the group that can make or break the value of the KM initiative, so multiple efforts to solicit feedback should be pursued. For example, each nugget could provide a feedback form when directly accessed through the KM database ("Was this nugget helpful?"). In addition, the KM team could mail out random monthly surveys on the system, create a KM wiki or other collaborative discussion group, or simply target some employees for face-to-face interviews.
   

Beyond the 4: Other steps to increase KM success

While there is no shortage of opinion on how best to roll out and improve a KM project, we will highlight some effective to dos:

• Define a useful kn. What is a good knowledge nugget? Is it a sentence or a paragraph? Is an attached Word doc OK, or should there be a writeup? Sometimes knowledge takes other forms, such as an employee's business relationships (e.g., social networks, such as LinkedIn). Other times, knowledge seems so obvious that no one thinks it is necessary to write it down. In the KM world, there is also "tacit" knowledge -- something an employee may not even think he or she possess. Then there is the other problem -- overloading a KM database with well-intentioned kn spam. Too much "knowledge noise" will make it hard to surface useful nuggets.
  
  The issue of what is an effective nugget is critical and well worth the time to discuss. For many organizations, effective kns can't be determined until after the first or second round of feedback.
  
  
• Plan on protecting KM databases and limiting external nugget exposure. Since the organizational knowledge trapped in individuals' heads and departments' collective brains is a competitive advantage, losing control of a KM database -- or even critical kns -- would be a major blunder. Imagine if your competitor had unlimited access to your KM database and could take advantage of your best tips on streamlining a product launch. Just as organizations protect their proprietary product data and customer lists, they need to safeguard KM repositories.
  
  
• Develop and enforce kn entry rules. As mentioned above, an all-volunteer KM entry process will fail. The KM database will end up populated by numerous entries from a few individuals who sacrifice their work time for nugget entry, while the masses will avoid the system to focus on the myriad near-term obligations of their job. An organization that doesn't want to apply the "stick" doesn't really care about KM and shouldn't invest in a system or, at the very least, expect much in terms of a return on investment.
  
  
• Surface the best nuggets. Not all nuggets are created equal. KM teams need a way to rate the value of kn entries. Examples of technology in use today include group moderation systems used on blogs and Web communities. For example, at slashdot, users are asked to occasionally rank peer posts, which in turn enables readers to set thresholds for viewing comments. Digg has it own system that allows positively rated stories to rise to the top. Instituting these types of solutions enables the users themselves to determine the most useful nuggets while not precluding executives and KM teams from highlighting their favored kns.
  
  
• Avoid KM technology seduction. There are plenty of KM tools -- including generic tools that can perform KM duties -- and vendors can paint a very compelling vision of a tool's usefulnesses. However, well-planned KM initiatives can fail because a team or champion becomes too enamored with a certain type of technology, a specific tool, or a particular vendor. When in doubt, teams should rely on a simpler, standards-based technology and grow the solution. A project can begin with no-cost or inexpensive solutions, such as open source blog or wiki software, departmental databases, and existing assets, such as internal Web servers.
  

By: Tom Rhinelander, NRG Analyst