Knowledge Management Processes
3.1 Knowledge and Its Management
In the first chapter, we introduced the growing importance of knowledge as the central resource for competition in both the nation-state and in business.
Because of this, the importance of intelligence organizations providing strategic knowledge to public- and private-sector decision makers is paramount. We can summarize this importance of intelligence to the public or private enterprise in three assertions about knowledge.
First, knowledge has become the central asset or resource for competitive advantage. In the Tofflers’ third wave, knowledge displaces capital, labor, and natural resources as the principal reserve of the enterprise. This is true in wealth creation by businesses and in national security and the conduct of warfare for nation-states.
Second, it is asserted that the management of the knowledge resource is more complex than other resources. The valuation and auditing of knowledge is unlike physical labor or natural resources; knowledge is not measured by “head counts” or capital valuation of physical inventories, facilities, or raw materials (like stockpiles of iron ore, fields of cotton, or petroleum reserves). New meth- ods of quantifying the abstract entity of knowledge—both in people and in explicit representations—are required. In order to accomplish this complex challenge, knowledge managers must develop means to capture, store, create, and exchange knowledge, while dealing with the sensitive security issues of knowing when to protect and when to share (the trade-off between the restric- tive “need to know” and the collaborative “need to share”).
The third assertion about knowledge is that its management therefore requires a delicate coordination of people, processes, and supporting technolo- gies to achieve the enterprise objectives of security, stability, and growth in a dynamic world:
• People.KM must deal with cultures and organizational structures that enable and reward the growth of knowledge through collaborative learning, reasoning, and problem solving.
• Processes.KM must also provide an environment for exchange, discov- ery, retention, use, and reuse of knowledge across the organization.
• Technologies. Finally, IT must be applied to enable the people and processes to leverage the intellectual asset of actionable knowledge.
Definitions of KM as a formal activity are as diverse as its practitioners (Table 3.1), but all have in common the following general characteristics:
• KM is based on a strategythat accepts knowledge as the central resource to achieve business goals and that knowledge—in the minds of its peo- ple, embedded in processes, and in explicit representations in knowl- edge bases—must be regarded as an intellectual form of capital to be leveraged. Organizational values must be coupled with the growth of this capital.
Table 3.1
Representative Diversity of KM Definitions A Sampling of KM Definitions
“A conscious strategy of getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time and helping people share and put information into action in ways that strive toimprove organizational
performance.” —O’Dell and Grayson [1]
“… an emerging discipline that stresses a formalized, integrated approach to managing an enterprise’s tangible and intangible information assets. ...KM is a coordinated attempt to tap the unrealized potential for sharing and reuse that lies in an enterprise’s collective consciousness.”
—The Gartner Group [2]
“The leveraging of intellectual capital to increase the organization’s capacity for collective action which creates business value.”—Motorola University [2]
“The notion of putting the combined knowledge of the firm at an employee’s fingertips is the essence of knowledge management. The basic goal: to take key pieces of data from various sources, such as groupware, databases, applications and people’s minds, and make them readily available to users in an organized, logical form that represents knowledge.” —Sharon Watson [3]
“A systematic process for acquiring, creating, integrating, sharing, and using information, insights, and experiences, to achieve organizational goals.” —U.S. DoD Rapid Improvement Team for Acquisition KM [2]
A systematic process for acquiring, creating, integrating, sharing, and using information, insights, and experiences, to make the right business decisions and achieve organizational goals.
Objectives to:
Facilitate natural communities of practice
Develop an architecture for systematic and integrated knowledge sharing both within and across communities of practice
Convert knowledge into a usable tool for the acquisition professional,
Provide a disciplined and organized methodology for constant improvement and development of knowledge domains
“All with the goal of encouraging innovation and producing successful results.” —U.S. Marine Corps System Command’s Rapid Improvement KM Team [2]
“Create a capability where the acquisition worker can locate acquisition knowledge on demand, from any source, at any time, from any location with a high degree of confidence that information is accurate and relevant.” —U.S. Navy’s Acquisition Reform Office Vision for Acquisition Knowledge Management Systems [2]
• KM involves a processthat, like a supply chain, moves from raw materials (data) toward knowledge products. The process is involved in acquiring (data), sorting, filtering, indexing and organizing (information), reason- ing (analyzing and synthesizing) to create knowledge, and finally dis- seminating that knowledge to users. But this supply chain is not a
“stovepiped” process (a narrow, vertically integrated and compart- mented chain); it horizontally integrates the organization, allowing col- laboration across all areas of the enterprise where knowledge sharing provides benefits.
• KM embraces a discipline and cultural valuesthat accept the necessity for sharing purpose, values, and knowledge across the enterprise to leverage group diversity and perspectives to promote learning and intellectual problem solving. Collaboration, fully engaged communication and cognition, is required to network the full intellectual power of the enterprise.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has adopted the following
“people-oriented” definition of KM to guide its own intelligence efforts:
Strategies and processes to create, identify, capture, organize and leverage vital skills, information and knowledge to enable people to best accomplish the organizational mission [4].
The U.S. DoD has recognized the sharp contrast in the industrial and knowledge age models of national security (Table 3.2) and the change in per- spective from emphasizing weapons and sensor platforms in hierarchies to an emphasis on a knowledge-based warfighting enterprise operating in networks.
The network-centric model recognizes the enterprise comprised of human (knowledge) resources, which requires shared knowledge creation, sharing, and viewing [5]. The DoD has further recognized that KM isthecritical enabler for information superiority:
The ability to achieve and sustain information superiority depends, in large measure, upon the creation and maintenance of reusable knowledge bases;
the ability to attract, train, and retain a highly skilled work force proficient in utilizing these knowledge bases; and the development of core business processes designed to capitalize upon these assets [6].
The processes by which abstract knowledge results in tangible effects can be examined as a net of influences that effect knowledge creation and decision making (Figure 3.1). Of course, all competing enterprises apply knowledge; here we are seeking to understand how knowledge contributes the deciding marginal
benefit to an organization. The flow of influences in the figure illustrates the essential contributions of shared knowledge.
1. Dynamic knowledge. At the central core is a comprehensive and dynamic understanding of the complex (business or national security) situation that confronts the enterprise. This understanding accumu- lates over time to provide a breadth and depth of shared experience, or organizational memory.
2. Critical and systems thinking. Situational understanding and accumu- lated experience enables dynamic modeling to provide forecasts from current situations—supporting the selection of adapting organiza- tional goals. Comprehensive understanding (perception) and thor- ough evaluation of optional courses of actions (judgment) enhance decision making. As experience accumulates and situational knowl- edge is refined, critical explicit thinking and tacit sensemaking about current situations and the consequences of future actions is enhanced.
3. Shared operating picture. Shared pictures of the current situation (com- mon operating picture), past situations and outcomes (experience), and forecasts of future outcomes enable the analytic workforce to col- laborate and self-synchronize in problem solving.
Table 3.2
DoD Contrast in National Security Business Model Perspectives Industrial Age Model
(Platform Centric)
Knowledge Age Model (Network Centric)
Producer valued Customer valued
People viewed as costs People viewed as assets
Individual focus Enterprise focus
Function-based operations Process-based operations Isolated activities within functions Integrated processes facilitate
sharing
Local view Global view
Reducing operations to decrease cost and increase profits
Systems-thinking approach to increasing productivity and profits Individual responsibility Shared responsibility
Scarce resources Infinite resources (human, structural, and intellectual)
Span of control Span of influence
4. Focused knowledge creation. Underlying these functions is a focused data and experience acquisition process that tracks and adapts as the business or security situation changes.
While Figure 3.1 maps thegeneralinfluences of knowledge on goal setting, judgment, and decision making in an enterprise, an understanding of how knowledge influences aparticularenterprise in a particularenvironmentis neces- sary to develop a KM strategy. Such a strategy seeks to enhance organizational knowledge of these four basic areas as well as information security to protect the intellectual assets. Examples of business and military applications of such a five- part strategy are summarized in Table 3.3. Note that the first four strategy areas correspond to the four contributions of knowledge discussed in the previous paragraph.
Better selection of goals
-
Acquire most critical data
More complete decision making
judgment Comprehensive
experience, learning
Focus on most critical
issues Understand
data-to-situation relationships
More complete understanding of situation Forecasts of
outcomes and consequences
Knowledge creating
Operations Knowledge influence flow Impact on actions
-
Shared operating
picture
•Self-synchronizing, adaptive and responsive community
•Situation awareness Exchange of experience and group learning
•Organizational agility Optimum, proactive decisions Effects and outcome-based decisions Rapid decision response time
•
•
• Decision making
Enables predictions
Provides a basis for
Provides necessary and sufficient data
Guides search and acquisition Sets context for Accumulates to
Enables estimates
Tailors Enables
dynamic modeling
Guides context of interpretation
Enables agile focus of attention to Establishes a
framework for
Figure 3.1 The influence flow of knowledge to action.
Table 3.3
Knowledge-Enhancement Strategy Components
Strategy
Knowledge Enhancements
Business Intelligence Enhancements
Military Intelligence Enhancements 1. Dynamic
Knowledge—
remain aware of the situation and acquire the right data
Improve the quantity, quality, accuracy, rate of update, and range of data types to achieve full understanding of processes to permit precision control
Statistical sampling Total quality management (TQM)—Taguchi analysis methods
Sales (demand) and supply chain (supply) data warehousing
Market trend analysis
Intelligence data warehousing Data fusion to detect known targets, threats Data mining to discover relationships, changes, abnormal patterns of behavior
2. Support Critical, Systems Thinking—
provide aids to perception and decision
Support exploratory thinking of alternative hypotheses, future courses of action (options assessment), and consequences
Market dynamics modeling Supply and demand forecasting aids Cost-risk analysis
Multiple competing hypothesis analysis Multiple course of action (COA) assessment Commander decision aids 3. Shared
Operating Picture—
distribute and apply the knowledge effectively
Provide timely and widely distributed information to all process participants—
in appropriate formats with appropriate content
Electronic mail Collaborative electronic interaction tools Multiple-access business database
Intelligence distribution (intelligence links) Collaborative decision making aids Real-time common operating picture (COP) 4. Focus
Knowledge Creation—
optimize the information supply chain
Refine the process of converting data to actionable knowledge:
speed, accuracy, uncertainty management, and decision support
Data warehousing Data fusion Data mining Statistical process control
Sensor system refinements in coverage, detection, precision, revisit rate, and dwell
Multisensor coverage
5. Protection of Intellectual Capital—
ensure the protection of information
Protect the source data, information extraction, warehous- ing, and distribution from corruption, exploitation (eavesdropping), and deterioration
Industrial information security (INFOSEC) Database backup Commercial encryption Internet security (firewalls, encryption) E-mail security
Military INFOSEC Operational security Key distribution Encryption Intrusion detection