INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE MANAGMENT

Unfortunately, there's no universal definition of knowledge management (KM), just as there's no agreement as to what constitutes knowledge in the first place. For this reason, it's best to think of KM in the broadest context. Succinctly put, KM is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Most often, generating value from such assets involves codifying what employees, partners and customers know, and sharing that information among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices. It's important to note that the definition says nothing about technology; while KM is often facilitated by IT, technology by itself is not KM. Think of a golf caddie as a simplified example of a knowledge worker. Good caddies do more than carry clubs and track down wayward balls. When asked, a good caddie will give advice to golfers, such as, "The wind makes the ninth hole play 15 yards longer. " Accurate advice may lead to a bigger tip at the end of the day. On the flip side, the golfer having derived a benefit from the caddie's advice may be more likely to play that course again. If a good caddie is willing to share what he knows with other caddies, then they all may eventually earn bigger tips. How would KM work to make this happen? The caddie master may decide to reward caddies for sharing their tips by offering them credits for pro shop merchandise. Once the best advice is collected, the course manager would publish the information in notebooks (or make it available on PDAs), and distribute them to all the caddies. The end result of a well-designed KM program is that everyone wins. In this case, caddies get bigger tips and deals on merchandise, golfers play better because they benefit from the collective experience of caddies, and the course owners win because better scores lead to more repeat business. KM has assumed greater urgency in American business over the past few years as millions of baby boomers prepare to retire over the coming decade. Tens of millions of baby boomers turned 60 in 2005, so those of them who arent already retired are certainly planning to do so soon. And when they punch out for the last time, the knowledge they gleaned about their jobs, companies and industries over the course of their long careers walks out with themunless companies take measures to retain their insights. In addition to an immanent mass retirement, the outsourcing trend has forced CIOs who have entered into outsourcing agreements address the thorny issue of transferring the knowledge of their full-time staff members, who are losing their jobs because of an outsourcing deal, to the outsourcers employees in order to smooth the transition to the newly restructured IT organization.

 DEFINATION

Knowledge Management (KM) refers to a multi-disciplined approach to achieving organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge. KM focuses on processes such as acquiring, creating and sharing knowledge and the cultural and technical foundations that support them.

Knowledge management is the name of a concept in which an enterprise consciously and comprehensively gathers, organizes, shares, and analyzes its knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skill

Knowledge Management is the discipline of enabling individuals, teams and entire organisations to collectively and systematically create, share and apply knowledge, to better achieve their objectives"

Knowledge management will deliver outstanding collaboration and partnership working. It will ensure the region maximizes the value of its information and knowledge assets and it will help its citizens to use their creativity and skills better, leading to improved effectiveness and greater innovation".

Knowledge management comprises a range of practices used by organisations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness, and learning across the organisations.

HISTORY An overarching theory of knowledge management has yet to emerge, perhaps because the practices associated with managing knowledge have their roots in a variety of disciplines and domains. Special thanks to Karl Wiig for supplying us with a prepublication copy of "Knowledge Management:Where Did It Come From and Where Will It Go?" which will appear in The Journal of Expert Systems with Applications. This section draws heavily on that work but supplies only a small part of that value. A number of management theorists have contributed to the evolution of knowledge management, among them such notables as Peter Drucker, Paul Strassmann, and Peter Senge in the United States. Drucker and Strassmann have stressed the growing importance of information and explicit knowledge as organizational resources, and Senge has focused on the "learning organization," a cultural dimension of managing knowledge. Chris Argyris, Christoper Bartlett, and Dorothy Leonard-Barton of Harvard Business School have examined various facets of managing knowledge. In fact, Leonard-Bartons well-known case study of Chaparral Steel, a company which has had an effective knowledge management strategy in place since the mid-1970s, inspired the research documented in her Wellsprings of Knowledge Building and Sustaining Sources of Innovation (Harvard Business School Press, 1995). Everett Rogers work at Stanford in the diffusion of innovation and Thomas Allens research at MIT in information and technology transfer, both of which date from the late 1970s, have also contributed to our understanding of how knowledge is produced, used, and diffused within organizations. By the mid-1980s, the importance of knowledge (and its expression in professional competence) as a competitive asset was apparent, even though classical economic theory ignores (the value of) knowledge as an asset and most organizations still lack strategies and methods for managing it. Recognition of the growing importance of organizational knowledge was accompanied by concern over how to deal with exponential increases in the amount of available knowledge and increasingly complex products and processes. The computer technology that contributed so heavily to superabundance of information started to become part of the solution, in a variety of domains. Doug Engelbarts Augment (for "augmenting human intelligence"), which was introduced in 1978, was an early hypertext/groupware application capable of interfacing with other applications and systems. Rob Acksyns and Don McCrackens Knowledge Management System (KMS), an open distributed hypermedia tool, is another notable example and one that predates the World Wide Web by a decade. The 1980s also saw the development of systems for managing knowledge that relied on work done in artificial intelligence and expert systems, giving us such concepts as "knowledge acquisition," "knowledge engineering," "knowledge-base systems, and computer-based ontologies.

The phrase "knowledge management" entered the lexicon in earnest. To provide a technological base for managing knowledge, a consortium of U.S. companies started the Initiative for Managing Knowledge Assets in 1989. Knowledge management-related articles began appearing in journals like Sloan Management Review, Organizational Science, Harvard Business Review, and others, and the first books on organizational learning and knowledge management were published (for example, Senges The Fifth Discipline and Sakaiyas The Knowledge Value Revolution). By 1990, a number of management consulting firms had begun in-house knowledge management programs, and several well known U.S., European, and Japanese firms had instituted focused knowledge management programs. Knowledge management was introduced in the popular press in 1991, when Tom Stewart published "Brainpower" in Fortune magazine. Perhaps the most widely read work to date is Ikujiro Nonakas and Hirotaka Takeuchis The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation (1995). By the mid-1990s, knowledge management initiatives were flourishing, thanks in part to the Internet. The International Knowledge Management Network (IKMN), begun in Europe in 1989, went online in 1994 and was soon joined by the U.S.-based Knowledge Management Forum and other KM-related groups and publications. The number of knowledge management conferences and seminars is growing as organizations focus on managing and leveraging explicit and tacit knowledge resources to achieve competitive advantage. In 1994 the IKMN published the results of a knowledge management survey conducted among European firms, and the European Community began offering funding for KM-related projects through the ESPRIT program in 1995. Knowledge management, which appears to offer a highly desirable alternative to failed TQM and business process re-engineering initiatives, has become big business for such major international consulting firms as Ernst & Young, Arthur Andersen, and Booz-Allen & Hamilton. In addition, a number of professional organizations interested in such related areas as benchmarking, best practices, risk management, and change management are exploring the relationship of knowledge management to their areas of special expertise

What constitutes intellectual or knowledge-based assets? Not all information is valuable. Therefore, it's up to individual companies to determine what information qualifies as intellectual and knowledge-based assets. In general, however, intellectual and knowledge-based assets fall into one of two categories: explicit or tacit. Included among the former are assets such as patents, trademarks, business plans, marketing research and customer lists. As a general rule of thumb, explicit knowledge consists of anything that can be documented, archived and codified, often with the help of IT. Much harder to grasp is the concept of tacit knowledge, or the know-how contained in people's heads. The challenge inherent with tacit knowledge is figuring out how to recognize, generate, share and manage it. While IT in the form of e-mail, groupware, instant messaging and related technologies can help facilitate the dissemination of tacit knowledge, identifying tacit knowledge in the first place is a major hurdle for most organizations.

Besides using technology, how else can tacit knowledge be transferred? Shadowing and joint-problem solving are two best practices for transferring or recreating tacit knowledge inside an organization. With shadowing, less experienced staff observe more experienced staff in their activities to learn how their more experienced counterparts approach their work. Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap, two knowledge management experts, stress the importance of having the "protg" discuss their observations with the "expert" in order to deepen their dialog and crystallize the knowledge transfer. Another sound approach that Leonard and Swift recommend is joint problem-solving by expert and novice. Since people are often unaware of how they approach problems or do their work and therefore cant automatically generate step-by-step instructions for doing whatever they do, having them work together on a project will bring the experts approach to light. The difference between shadowing and joint problem solving is that shadowing is more passive. With joint problem-solving, the "expert" and the "novice" work hand-in-hand on a task. What benefits can companies expect from KM? Some benefits of KM correlate directly to bottom-line savings, while others are more difficult to quantify. In today's information-driven economy, companies uncover the most opportunities and ultimately derive the most value from intellectual rather than physical assets. To get the most value from a company's intellectual assets, KM practitioners maintain that knowledge must be shared and serve as the foundation for collaboration. Yet better collaboration is not an end in itself; without an overarching business context, KM is meaningless at best and harmful at worst. Consequently, an effective KM program should help a company do one or more of the following:

Foster innovation by encouraging the free flow of ideas Improve customer service by streamlining response time Boost revenues by getting products and services to market faster Enhance employee retention rates by recognizing the value of employees' knowledge and rewarding them for it Streamline operations and reduce costs by eliminating redundant or unnecessary processes These are the most prevalent examples. A creative approach to KM can result in improved efficiency, higher productivity and increased revenues in practically any business function.

What are the challenges of KM? Getting Employees on Board The major problems that occur in KM usually result because companies ignore the people and cultural issues. In an environment where an individual's knowledge is valued and rewarded, establishing a culture that recognizes tacit knowledge and encourages employees to share it is critical. The need to sell the KM concept to employees shouldn't be underestimated; after all, in many cases employees are being asked to surrender their knowledge and experience the very traits that make them valuable as individuals. KM Requires Ongoing Maintenance As with many physical assets, the value of knowledge can erode over time. Since knowledge can get stale fast, the content in a KM program should be constantly updated, amended and deleted. Whats more, the relevance of knowledge at any given time changes, as do the skills of employees. Therefore, there is no endpoint to a KM program. Like product development, marketing and R&D, KM is a constantly evolving business practices. Dealing with a Data Deluge Companies diligently need to be on the lookout for information overload. Quantity rarely equals quality, and KM is no exception. Indeed, the point of a KM program is to identify and disseminate knowledge gems from a sea of information. One tried-and-true way to build support for KM is to pilot the project among employees who have the most to gain and would be the most open to sharing their knowledge. This will vary depending on the organization. Its also a good idea to involve in the pilot a select group of influencersemployees who are well-respected by their peers and whose opinions are highly regarded in the organization. If both groups have good things to say about the KM effort, their positive attitudes will go along way toward convincing others of the merits of KM. To get people to participate in the KM effort, you have to bake knowledge collection and dissemination into employees everyday jobs. In other words, you have to make it as easy for them to participate as possible. A lot of early KM efforts failed because they added cumbersome steps to the jobs of already overworked employees. So when things got busy, workers just didn't bother with the extra steps. And since most people are already stretched so thin these days, they cant contemplate adding another layer onto their daily routine. The best KM efforts dont seem like an effort. Linking KM directly to job performance, creating a safe climate for people to share ideas and recognizing people who contribute to the KM effort (especially those people whose contributions impact the bottom line) are also critical tactics for getting people to make KM a part of their day to day.

Finally, many companies create incentive programs to motivate employees to share their knowledge. This can work, but the danger with incentive programs is that employees will participate solely to earn incentives, without regard to the quality or relevance of the information they contribute. Ideally, participation in KM should be its own reward. If KM doesn't make life easier for employees, it will fail. Our story is chock full of practical advice on how to get the most resistant organizations to embrace KM.

Knowledge Management Strategy While the knowledge management processes section dealt with the general ways knowledge can be managed, this section tackles long-term knowledge management strategy. Strategic investments represent the companys choices/options so as to enable and enhance the processes outlined earlier (e.g. knowledge sharing) and to offer help define which knowledge is relevant (i.e. in line with strategic objectives) and which is not. This section is based on the strategic part of the integrated knowledge management model, which includes:

Knowledge management strategic initiatives: Invest: Support of existing structures, competencies, knowledge retention mechanisms, culture, external network, and knowledge management systems Invest: Implement changes to structures, competencies, knowledge retention mechanisms, culture, external network, and knowledge management systems Divest: Remove obsolete knowledge

The articles that follow are based solely on the points under "invest". Based on that we arrive at the following headings:

KM and Organizational Structures KM and Organizational Culture KM and Knowledge Retention KM and Core Competencies KM and External Knowledge Network KM and Knowledge Management Systems Summary: Knowledge Management Best Practices

As many of you might realize, many of the strategic initiatives deal with aspects that extend into different branches of management. I will endeavor to stick to the scope of this subsection and, for the most part, limit my discussion only to aspects relevant to knowledge management strategy. Furthermore, at all stages of the following discussion on knowledge management strategy, I will also refer to different knowledge types and to IT systems, whenever necessary. However, the subsection dealing with knowledge management systems will be the first that focuses specifically on IT. It will discuss the general implementation issues, leading to the subsequent section that looks at some specific systems and tools. At the end, I will present a summary of all the conclusions and recommendations made throughout this section and the one on knowledge management processes, in a subsection titled Knowledge Management Best Practices.

What are the processes of Knowledge Management (KM)? KM involves processes that facilitate the application and development of organizational knowledge and aims to create value and to increase/sustain competitive advantage for the organization in 3 dimensions: Strategic dimension - highlights the strategic importance of knowledge and its management in a companys strategy Managerial dimension - highlights organizational knowledge assessment and management Operational dimension - highlights the development and usage of knowledge and intellectual assets

KM supports and coordinates the generation, codification, transfer and application of individual knowledge in value creation processes. There are generally 4 stages of KM processes: 1. Knowledge Creation/Generation Companies create a great amount of data and information in their daily business activities. It would be essential for the company to have a system of managing the newly created information so it can be reused to solve new problems or leveraged to value-add to other business activities. For example, high technology companies may often received a lot of feedbacks from customers on their products. This kind of information could be very useful for the R&D team to come up with new improved products. Companies may find that they cannot meet their knowledge requirement from their available knowledge assets. The gap will have to be filled either by internally developing new knowledge or acquiring the knowledge from external sources. Knowledge creation can only be achieved in a creative environment that encourages teamwork and the use of creative

potential. If manage successfully, the process can expand or change the company's knowledge base to meet the company's current and future needs. 2. Knowledge Codification Data and information need to be collected and analyzed in order to turn them into useful knowledge. This is the stage where tacit knowledge is converted into explicit knowledge and is very critical to the success of the other two stages - application and transfer. Without documenting and codifying tacit knowledge, its transfer for the purposes of learning and utilization, both internally and externally, will be difficult to achieve. Furthermore, legal protection of these valuable knowledge assets can only be done if the knowledge has been codified. For examples, patent applications require the complete disclosures of the inventions and trade secrets require the demonstration of safe-keeping of documented information. The legal rights come with IP protection offers the company a distinct advantage which can be used to derive revenues from IP licensing or exclusive rights to commercialize. 3. Knowledge Application It is not unusual for companies to not to know how to generate value from the use of the knowledge assets they have. It is worse when a company does not even know the kind of knowledge it has. Knowledge Management offers a management system for the company to ensure that their knowledge assets when created are properly documented, and that the knowledge in different domain owners will be shared within the organization. When knowledge assets are documented and shared, knowledge utilization will be facilitated. This is the stage in Knowledge Management where value creation is delivered. By harnessing knowledge from different knowledge domains and competencies across the organization, direct impacts to the missions and goals of the company can be achieved. 4. Knowledge Transfer One of the advantages of knowledge is that knowledge is dynamic. Knowledge can be adapted and evolved through the processes of learning and sharing. The impact made by individual knowledge is not as great as collective knowledge so sharing within the organization should be encouraged. When a company has limited capability to effectively use certain knowledge, it would be worthwhile to consider external transfer to third parties who may have the competencies to utilize the knowledge for value creation. For example, a company may have invented a new technology but it does not have the capability to produce products based on such invention. The technology can be licensed to a third party who has the production facilities and the marketing and sales capability to sell the new product. To ensure success of this technology transfer, it is essential that tacit knowledge and procedural knowledge are converted to explicit knowledge for easy learning, adaptation and utilization.

BENEFITS OF KM
What are the advantages of adopting a knowledge management strategy? Knowledge management prevents staff from constantly reinventing the wheel, provides a baseline for progress measurement, reduces the burden on expert attrition, makes visual thinking tangible, and manages effectively large volumes of information to help employees serve their clients better and faster. Being a fundamental business enabler, knowledge management will help organisations:

Protect their intellectual capital Focus on their most important assets: their human capital Re-orient their culture by opting for an optimal knowledge sharing strategy Link people to people by setting up collaborative methods

Knowledge management opens the doors to a new era of collaboration and sharing Nowadays, with corporate mergers, employee turnover and global expansion, people must work differently: they need to collaborate with peers that are overseas, exchange ideas, keep current on global matters and have quick answers to their questions. The power of Social Media plays an important role in knowledge management as it enables employees to collaborate, connect and rapidly access to experts and information. Social networks also allow people to collaborate, to be human and to express themselves in the electronic environment. They have a solid foundation of trust and popularity among employees and they are part of the knowledge sharing culture. Increasing company benefits with an effective knowledge management strategy Knowledge management helps solve most of the common business problems and helps companies increase their benefits by:

Improving business decisions thanks to facilitated access to expertise and to leading practices Increasing efficiency, productivity and work smarter by reducing cases of reinventing the wheel Improving innovation through wider and borderless collaboration Reducing loss of know-how by capturing explicit and tacit knowledge Speeding productivity with on-board trainings and timely access to knowledge Increasing client satisfaction by delivering value insights

Knowledge management in Australian law firms and the accelerating rate of change By Leona Blanco and Chris Latta In brief - Advances in technology and demographic changes are revolutionising the way that law firms manage knowledge Technology is becoming more powerful and pervasive. Lawyers are younger and more of them are female. The need to share knowledge in today's legal profession is an ongoing challenge within law firms where individual lawyers have traditionally competed for billable time and to be seen as the expert. What is the difference between information and knowledge? In the last half of the last century, the world moved from an industrial society to an information society. We are now transitioning from an information society to a knowledge society. The difference between information and knowledge is that computers have information and people have knowledge: people know what the information means. As the saying goes, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. The facts are information, the opinion is knowledge. While facts beat opinions that aren't in alignment with the facts, once the facts are established, it is the best opinion on the given facts (that is, the best application of knowledge to the problem) that will win. Consequently, for most organisations knowledge is their key differentiator. It is the basis of their business and at the heart of their competitive advantage. This is amplified in information based businesses like law firms. As such, managing something as seemingly intangible as knowledge needs to be a core business strategy. Rate of production of knowledge is increasing There is also an increasing abundance of knowledge available. Individuals are bombarded with information almost continually. Some, probably most, of this needs no action taken on it, some should be outright ignored. Some of the information needs to be codified into knowledge. Not only is this production of knowledge increasing but the rate of the production of knowledge is itself increasing. This makes knowledge management even more crucial. (SeeKnowledge Management in Law Firms by Stefane Kabene et al.) Expansion of knowledge drives need for greater efficiency Law firm knowledge managers often feel that they are being asked to do more with less.

Now, you can't actually do more with less. You can do something different and that something different may be more effective but you can't actually do more of the same for less. However, if the production of knowledge (both the volume of knowledge and the rate of production of more knowledge) is increasing, then simply through the passing of time you will be asked to do more with less. So we need to become more effective. However, there is a problem. There are human limits that put a ceiling on our ability to absorb, process and retain knowledge. Dunbar's number and the limits to human knowledge British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorised that the number of social group members a primate can track and can keep a social relationship with is directly proportional to the size of the neocortex. For humans this number is around 150. For knowledge managers, this type of research has a compelling message. Dunbar's number tells us that human knowledge (in this instance, knowledge of a person's social network) has limits. By extension, this informs us that, as amazing as the human brain is, there are limits to the amount of knowledge that we can formulate, process and store. Beyond this, we are going to need help. Fortunately, help is on its way. Evolution of computers in the last 30 years Thirty years ago (1982), a personal computing device of the day - the Osborne Executive portable computer - weighed 13kg and cost $2,495. The phone that many people carry in their pocket, the iPhone, is one hundredth of the weight, a hundred times faster and costs a tenth of the price. For a more recent example, the phone in your pocket is probably as fast and has similar capacity to your desktop computer of just over a decade ago. Moore's Law, processor speed and memory capacity Moore's Law states that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. This affects things like processor speed and memory capacity so that these are increasing at an exponential rate as well. For a long time, due to capacity and processing constraints, our personal computers have been mostly information processing devices. They have been excellent at it, augmenting areas that our human brains are weak at: speed of computation, and storing and processing vast amounts of data quickly.

If Moore's Law keeps holding, then by the year 2020 your personal computer will be able to process information as fast as the human brain. We are in a transition phase from personal information devices to personal knowledge assistants. Already there are systems that are available for knowledge in your pocket: Siri on the iPhone can work out what you mean when you say "Will I need an umbrella this afternoon?" not just parsing voice to text and processing the meaning of that text, but knowing why you would need an umbrella, where you are located in the world, what time "this afternoon" means and what the weather will be. A software system called Summly parses and summarizes web content into bullet points on your iPhone. Symantec has introduced transparent predictive coding into document classification in a product called Clearwell eDiscovery Platform. So we see that knowledge management systems are becoming increasingly available at the personal device level and this trend will accelerate. Lawyers increasingly needing to share knowledge Knowledge sharing is key to knowledge management and to organisational success. However, sharing knowledge requires an open mindset which is challenging for law firms where lawyers are individually competing for billable time and to be seen as the expert. We can see this changing in the current generation of lawyers who are more used to sharing information (sometimes too much information) online with social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. Demographic changes in the legal profession There is a large demographic and therefore cultural shift with the current generation of lawyers. In 1988 only 20% of lawyers were female; now 46% are female, and this is expected to continue with more females studying law than males. One out of every ten solicitors has been admitted for less than a year, nearly a third for five years or less. In the last year in NSW: The profession grew 4% The number of females increased 6% 60% of new practicing certificates issued were to females 15% of solicitors work part time (21% of females, 10% of males)

Younger lawyers, more females and more flexible work arrangements In the next five years: The number of lawyers will increase (both absolute numbers and per capita) The number of law firms will increase The number of sole practitioner law firms will increase More than half of all legal practitioners will be female, up from 20% twenty years ago non-private practitioners are already over 50% female and will go to over 60% female Corporate sector will rise to around 20%; government will be steady at about 10% There will be fewer older, male solicitors Average age of legal practitioners will fall Flexible work arrangements will increase New generation of lawyers embracing technology So there is a gender balance shift and an age balance shift. With that has come an IT literacy shift with a corresponding cultural shift. There is also a work/life balance shift which is being increasingly assisted by technology. Emails and the internet were relatively new technologies for law firms just over a decade ago. Now you have them in your pocket. We believe this is a significant time for our profession, where the three facets of knowledge management are converging: Technology Organisational (or cultural) Ecological (interactions of people, systems and knowledge) The technology is becoming more powerful, more personal and ubiquitous; we have younger, more technically adept people moving into positions of power in our firms, yielding a cultural shift; and the intersections between people and systems, and the knowledge assets that they manage, are becoming seamless and frictionless.

Knowledge sharing is key to good knowledge management At the heart of knowledge management is culture - developing a culture of learning and a culture of sharing. Because at the end of the day, knowledge is about connections. After all, the most important development in telephony was not the invention of the first telephone, but the installation of the second telephone.

Knowledge Management (KM) in Research Institutions

In a previous post I wrote about KM for Collaboration and Innovation, and in this post I pointed out that research areas are critical to new product creation and the speed to market for new products are essential to stay ahead of your competitors. KM plays a central role not only from the perspective of innovation by knowing what has been done and/or what is being done in other areas of research that can be utilized, but also from the collaboration and knowledge sharing among researchers contributing to the speed of new products to market. At its core the nature of research is to nurture open access to extensive amounts of tacit knowledge (knowledge within the minds of people) and explicit knowledge (knowledge that is written down) by applying a model that reflects the natural of flow of knowledge. The model of Connect Collect ---Reuse and Learn depicts a knowledge flow model that supports KM within research institutions and R&D functions within organizations. For KM to work within a research environment (as with other environments) a culture and structure that supports, rewards and proves the value KM can bring will encourage the continued use and adoption of the KM practice. In addition the choice of IT tools (which is of secondary importance) should be brought in to the organization to automate the knowledge flow and its associated process. The KM tool(s) must support KM goals/strategies, provide a means to connect, collect, catalog, access, and reuse tacit and explicit knowledge. In addition the KM tool(s) must capture new learning to share across the organization, and provide search and retrieval mechanisms to bring pertinent knowledge to the user. For those who are working in or interacting with research institutions and/or R&D departments I want to hear from you. I look forward to hearing your perspective on what KM is bringing to your world of research!

KM in Talent Management

Talent Management is often referred to Human Capital Management. Many organizations are faced with the problem of retaining talent as well as capturing the knowledge of the talent as it moves in and out of the organization. Knowledge Management (KM) plays an important role in converting individual knowledge into corporate knowledge making it available to be cataloged and shared throughout the organization. As part of a comprehensive KM strategy applied to Human Capital Management it is vital to establish a program that is executed when staff enters your organization and continues until the time that staff member leaves the organization. How is this accomplished? Initially through employee orientation, establishing a mentor protg relationship, mapping their roles, responsibilities and their work products to the specific duties that are being performed and executing a comprehensive exit interview. These are all aspects of a KM strategy aimed at moving your human capital to corporate capital. This strategy does not begin and end here! As staff members evolve in their roles the sharing, and cataloging of knowledge continues through the use of Communities of Practice (Cops), the creation of knowledge repositories, capturing lesson learned, and instituting a culture that values life-long learning and sharing of knowledge. Getting started with a KM strategy entails a collective visioning as to how sharing knowledge can enhance organizational performance, and the reaching of a consensus among the senior management of the organization that the course of action involved in sharing knowledge will in fact be pursued. Implicit in such a process is a set of decisions about the particular variety of knowledge management activities that the organization intends to pursue, including how the knowledge assets of the organization will be leveraged and the execution of the process and tools that will enable sharing and innovation to occur. Here are a couple of links to additional information to kick start the process of effectively managing your human capital:Human Capital Management Capturing Worker

Knowledge, The Case for Human Capital Management,Human Capital Institute, The Benefits of Effective Human Capital Management. I look forward to your comments and understanding how your organization is tackling this Human Capital Management Challenge!