organizational knowledge

A lengthy article on organizational knowledge and the people in the field highlights a number of common mistakes, all of which I have witnessed in my almost three decades of professional practice.

1. Treating organizational knowledge as an IT problem. This is evident in the budget for the technology purchase compared to human implementation. The latter often has no budget.
2. Focusing on explicit knowledge and ignoring tacit knowledge. This often comes in the form of offering a training course to cover the new knowledge of a system with no thought to helping people discuss how they will use the new system.
3. Ignoring the need for trust in order to share knowledge. As I have noted for years, knowledge flows at the speed of trust. No imposed system will generate trust.
4. Launching a KM initiative without visible leadership support. I have often seen organizational knowledge initiatives launched for the good of employees but with no engagement by executives. The lack of leadership by example dooms the project.
5. Underestimating the knowledge loss that happens during workforce transitions. With knowledge loss not evident in the next fiscal quarter, executives often ignore its impact.

The author also covers four good observations about project implementation.

1. Start with one question: “What knowledge do we not capture that we could not afford to lose?” I saw this with a pharmaceutical company that realized, too late, that they had captured why they had selected certain compounds for further research but not why they had rejected the others. When their knowledge about criteria changed, they could not go back and find other suitable compounds.
2. Choose a community. One of our most successful projects was involving the rather small community of Extension Agents at the University of Nebraska to develop ways of networked knowing.
3. Start somewhere small and visible. This is the only approach, in my experience, and is part of strategic doing.
4. Develop your vocabulary with your leadership team. This is critical, as you may think everyone understands concepts equally, but they usually do not. I often start by comparing collaboration with cooperation.