FREE online courses on Knowledge Management - Corporate Knowledge Management - Knowledge Management Tools

 

The most useful KM tools and techniques can be grouped as follows:

 

Organizational Knowledge Mapping

 

Do you know what you know? - This is a leading question in knowledge management. Knowledge mapping helps to achieve precisely that. Essentially what we are talking about is not so much knowledge mapping (or concept mapping as some would call it), but mapping:

 

• organizational knowledge resources,
• organizational knowledge assets (a resource becomes and asset after it is valorized),
• knowledge processes -- production, sharing, application, and
• knowledge culture and environment

 

In terms of the shape and form, these maps go beyond formal language, and create a product in the 'shared language of the organization'. They are called maps, because they are indeed like road maps that could be operationally useful for members of the organization.

 

Finally, they acquire the form of an artifact with ritualized symbolism, and form a part of the organizational culture.  The most important thing about the exercise is the mapping process itself, which is both participatory and meta-knowledge (knowledge about knowledge) producing.

 

Nurturing Communities of Practice

 

Communities of practice are the most spontaneous and naturally forming informal knowledge sharing groups in any organization. They can play a vital role in organizational knowledge production and sharing, if only they could be recognized, encouraged and supported.

 

Corporate Intranets and Extranets

 

An intranet is basically a platform based on internet principles (i.e., HTTP, TCP/IP standardized HTML browser) accessible only to members of an organization/community (through multi-layered security controls). The same, extended to an outer ring (e.g. dealer networks, registered customers, online members, etc.), with limited accessibility, is an extranet.

 

• The intranet can provide the platform for a safe and secured information management system within the organization, help people to collaborate as of virtual teams, crossing boundaries of geography and time.
• It can cut transaction costs, help in knowledge sharing, increase access to information, and improve productivity and quality.

 

They key to a successful corporate intranet lies in its self-governance. You can put together the most attractive, technologically savvy intranet. But without staff participation in accessing, using and putting up information, all that will be simply useless, worst, a wasted investment in a junk repository.

 

Repository management models

 

This refers to deployment of various information/documentation management software. The facilities include indexing, storage, retrieval and circulation systems, replication, collaborative group work on a common document, and so on. There are various degrees of integration stipulated under different types of software. One has to make an appropriate choice depending on mission-criticality, desirable degrees of flow-control, and so on. The software has also to be customized within the KM-strategic framework.

 

Tools and techniques are necessary and certainly useful, and should be deployed. But one should deploy technology as per contextual relevance and as per a KM strategy, and not be technology-driven as per the law of the instrument!

 

What matters most are:

• the way people interact with machines and with one another,
• the skills and capacity they have in using the tools and techniques,
• the attitudes they have on human relations and knowledge sharing, and
• the organizational culture and environment.

 

Besides appropriate tools and techniques, therefore, a great emphasis has to be put on human capacity building.