At a minimum,
■ Create an organizational knowledge base to house the intellectual assets.
■ Create a corporate yellow pages so that knowledge workers can find out who is knowledgeable in which areas of expertise.
■ Capture best practices and lessons learned and make them available to all others in the organization via the knowledge base.
■ Empower a Chief Knowledge Officer to develop and implement a KM strat- egy for the organization.
■ Ensure that the organizational culture will help facilitate the key phases required for the KM cycle (to capture, create, share, disseminate, acquire, and apply valuable knowledge).
Make sure that it is fairly easy to continually update and feed the corporate memory. Users should be able to contribute best practices, lessons learned, comments and questions about content, tips and tools they would recommend, working examples, and case studies. Openly encouraging and applying new
ideas fosters the cooperation and innovation that is critical to a learning organization.
Knowledge application is far more likely to succeed if the type of content that is being made available can “hit the ground running.” In other words, it is not just a repository of “stuff” but chunks of executable knowledge. The knowledge nuggets should always include tacit and contextual knowledge of when this should be used, where it can and cannot be applied, why and why not, and the ground truth or knowledge of how things really work and what is required for successful performance.
KEY POINTS
■ There are a number of ways of ensuring that individuals apply knowledge, such as deriving user and task models in order to better match knowledge content to individual knowledge workers’ preferences and requirements.
■ EPSS, the Bloom taxonomies of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor skills, and content chunking are all good means of providing learning and task support to knowledge workers who apply knowledge and of optimizing the match between user needs and the content that is to be applied.
■ A KM organizational architecture needs to be designed, developed, and implemented in order to facilitate knowledge application at the organiza- tional level.
■ Knowledge reuse is a good measure of how well valuable content has been preserved and managed in organizational memory management systems.
■ Knowledge Support Systems can assist in organizational knowledge use and reuse, typically through some form of knowledge repository or intranet application.
DISCUSSION POINTS
1. Discuss personalization and profiling approaches to model knowledge workers. How would you make use of more information about users in order to better target valuable knowledge content to them? How would you increase the likelihood of their applying the content?
2. When would you make use of which Bloom taxonomy? Provide exam- ples of some knowledge applications where each of the three taxonomies could provide useful information.
3. What are some of the tools used in organizational memory management?
4. What are the key components that should be addressed by an organi- zational KM architecture? Why are these components critical for orga- nizational knowledge application?
5. What is reuse, and why is it an important measure of the success of KM within an organization?
6. Why is knowledge application the most important step in the KM cycle?
7. How does knowledge application relate to the internalization phase of the Nonaka and Takeuchi knowledge spiral model that was presented in Chapter 3?
8. Discuss why counting the number of “hits” to a knowledge repository (much like website statistics) would not be the best measure of knowl- edge application within an organization.
9. What is chunking? Why is this a good content management strategy?
How would you take advantage of chunking for individual and orga- nizational knowledge application situations?
10. Provide an example of a task analysis for a task familiar to you. What are the major challenges in designing an EPSS based on such a task analysis? How would you address these challenges?
NOTES
1 B. Monasco, Sun’s knowledge network enhances its selling skills, Knowledge Inc., 1997.
2 Solstra 2000, International Knowledge Management News, October 20, 1999.
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