Knowledge Management 2.0

The ultimate irony of the internet’s creation is that the efforts were initially disparate and disjointed. Three organizations, working separately to develop similar results in host-to-host protocols, were brought together only by a conference in 1966 – when conferences mandated the attendance of their participants. As the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) organization set out to create the first host-to-host protocol, it did not know that other research was underway for a packet-based network by both the RAND group and NPL . DARPA, NPL, and RAND all operated in parallel unaware of each others work; however, their knowledge sharing, begun at the 1966 conference, lead to shared nomenclature, ideas, and ultimately the Internet.

Communications would never be the same – neither would knowledge management.

So what is Knowledge Management exactly? Knowledge Management, according to Wikipedia, “comprises a range of practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences.” Simply put, knowledge management reduces an organization’s need to reinvent the wheel, allows organizations to capitalize on intellectual property, and provides organizations the opportunity to capture organizational patterns. Effective knowledge management provides much more than a document warehouse, and this article will describe how organizations can improve themselves by leveraging knowledge management from the bottom-up.

Today, knowledge management moves far beyond the reaches of traditional, brick and mortar libraries. Software, hardware, and the supporting infrastructure are all adapting to improve the exchange of multimedia on multiple platforms. With the increased communications in all forms, document, videos, tutorials, and other alternatives, knowledge management no longer must come from the inner reaches of universities or from senior leadership down to the front line staff; rather, knowledge management may now, more than ever, be effectively built from the bottom up.
With the changing demographics in workforces, employees increasingly want to have a voice in their respective organizations, particularly in an age where incoming employees are accustomed to voicing their opinions and ideas on the Internet well before they enter the workforce. Corporations are under increasing pressure to provide an outlet for knowledge exchange. And that goes for not just for traditional top-down organizations. More flexible organizations such as Web 2.0 companies will have to provide methods and tools to vet and store ideas for future use lest they find their employees continually spinning off companies for themselves. Increasingly, employees will expect to interact with their senior leadership in the same way they interacted with their professors in college – in a flatter, more collegiate environment.

Several principles can help private and public companies improve knowledge management:

Get the knowledge management infrastructure right. Knowledge management is different than information warehousing. Collecting documents in a centralized storage area, such as a library or an electronic storage website, does not in itself provide the infrastructure required to develop knowledge, it only provides the basic building blocks. The knowledge management infrastructure should support the development and improvement of knowledge based literature, not just the collection of it. Amazon, the online store, provides the opportunity to collect a wide array of customer preference data and build a customer database from the bottom-up. Amazon is now capable of leveraging customer preferences to offer a host of services including the option to purchase items related to past purchases. This is a prime example of an organization leveraging its knowledge base, as opposed to simply collecting information, to provide improved services and opportunities.

Make knowledge measurable.
When utilizing a knowledge-based infrastructure, the tools should provide an opportunity for measurable results. Amazon, the online store, provides a great platform for measuring the satisfaction of customers with the products available. In the same vein, the collective IQ of employees should be tapped when measuring knowledge-based literature. Senior leadership will never have the insight of the front line staff member; nor will the staff member have the breadth and depth of experience of senior leadership. Ideas should be measurable by all parties so that they can be acted on and shaped over time. For example, YouTube provides a nearly ideal platform for knowledge management. While it is limited by one type of medium, video, YouTube offers the public the opportunity to measure a video’s quality using a five-star rating scale. This simple design allows for mass measurement and allows users to search for the highest rated videos. Similarly, if a knowledge-based document was added to this type of interface, users would be able to quickly and readily access only the most highly rated content. From there, qualitative assessments or comments would allow the user to make better judgments on the usage of a particular document.

Provide incentives for refinement.
Knowledge literature, even when supported by the right infrastructure and a measurable platform, needs the opportunity to be refined. Knowledge in any form, documents, videos, tutorials, etc., should be refined over the course of time. Knowledge literature, like products , can be iteratively improved to incorporate measurable feedback from other employees and stakeholders.

Putting these principles into action will allow organizations to develop both structurally and technologically. But, perhaps more important in this time of information overload, these principles will engage all levels of an organization, encouraging all to take part in developing, measuring, and refining the best solutions. The increased bottom-up participation of the collective intelligence within organizations can only serve to improve knowledge management of an organization. It is imperative though that organizations take the right steps and provide the infrastructure to support this mindset.

thetechnologist’s posterous

Knowledge Management 2.0

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