"Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It's
Superman! Like the mythological Chimera, Knowledge Management seems to be
made of many different aspects of business. In turn, people perceive it
differently - interpreting it in as many different ways as they perceive it.
Knowledge Management may be simply defined as
a set of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create,
represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such
insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or
embedded in organizations as processes or practices.
Any tool or system that facilitates one or
more these components will likely get categorized under the broad ambit of
Knowledge Management. For example, if we were to look at the various
tasks, then the tools that will get covered under this would include:
·
Identify insights and
experiences - Business
Intelligence, Business Analytics, Data Mining, e-Discovery, Search Engines
·
Create, Represent and
Distribute - Content
Management Systems, Taxonomy Classification tools and methods, Social
Collaboration tools et al
·
Enable adoption of
insights and experiences - Learning Management
tools, Business Process Management tools, et al
A few of them perform one or more of these
activities in a very narrow slice of the overall business - like Customer
Support and Service, Customer Relationship Management, or Infrastructure
Management. Most others work best in one of the above with the ability to
feed into the other aspects of the definition - for example, BI enables
identifying insights, but the rest of the activities are mostly carried out
outside of the scope of a BI tool.
Although I have listed Learning Management
tools and BPM tools under the third aspect of KM definition, in reality these
happen in a very passive manner, disconnected from the definition of KM
itself. BPM tools, especially are good at defining business rules and
changing processes that can cause improvement in performance, but will not be
able to relate to the actual experience or insight that caused this
change. Similarly, LMS tools can impact learning and enhance competencies
in people but will not be able to measure the performance enhancement.
Any organization looking on the path of
operational excellence will look at integrating one or more aspects of this
into their process and people improvement initiatives. However, depending on the level of automation
of business processes and the KM maturity, their choice of Knowledge tools will
vary. Depending on the urgency and level of maturity all of these applications
will typically end up vying for the same slice of the budgetary pie (as opposed
to the budget available for core and peripheral applications that are more
transactional in nature)
A Knowledge Management tool, should ideally straddle all three
aspects of the definition either in collaboration with other tools, or as a
stand-alone tool. The ability to adopt
insights and cause a shift in the way the organization works at the process and
people level, is really where Knowledge Management will become a key driver of
Business strategy and Performance improvement.
What tools do you know of, which serve one or more of these
functions in a seamless manner?
