Organizations are facing ever-increasing challenges brought on by
marketplace pressures and other factors.
Many organizations are now looking to knowledge management to address
these challenges. Such initiatives often begin with the development of a KM strategy.
What should organizations consider when developing
a KM strategy? Are there specific steps
to follow? If so, can a framework be
developed that others can adopt?
The MITRE
Corporation--a nonprofit organization working in the public interest in the
domains of national security, aviation, and tax administration--has embraced
knowledge sharing and integrated it into its corporate culture. Our KM strategy (illustrated below) aims to enhance mission
outcomes by leveraging internal and external expertise and assets, supporting the
exchange of knowledge among individuals and groups, supporting knowledge reuse
through capturing and sharing knowledge assets, and transferring knowledge explicitly
captured in knowledge assets back to people.
Having recently
revised our KM strategy, we are planning to use our breakout session at APQC's
upcoming knowledge management conference to share our process and lessons
learned. More specifically, we would
like to present our framework in an interactive setting and encourage
participants to contribute to the discussion by sharing their own processes and
experiences
with KM strategy development. At the end of the
session, we will update the framework in accordance with the feedback we
receive and then share the revised framework with participants to apply at
their organizations.
Key success factors of our framework include:
- Documenting a plan of action with associated
milestones
- Establishing a strong alignment with business
strategy
- Having leadership support for the KM program
- Maintaining a multidisciplinary team on the project
- Benchmarking with other KM practitioners
- Identifying research questions to drive strategy
development
- Measuring progress on our former KM strategy to establish
goals and measure progress
- Performing a preliminary self-assessment of the
maturity of the organization's KM practices
- Collecting baseline activity-level metrics
- Collecting behavioral metrics
We will discuss our framework and explore these
success factors in more depth at the conference. We encourage you to participate
in our collaborative session!
Jean Tatalias is the director of
knowledge services at MITRE. Dr. Marcie Zaharee is the manager for training and
KM integration at MITRE.
They will be among the presenters at
APQC's upcoming knowledge management conference, The Knowledge Transfer Revolution: New Paradigms, New Payoffs. You can learn more about the conference by clicking
here.
Dear Jean and Marcie,
We have been so impressed with MITRE's KM work and especially the way you test and adapt new approache. Thank you for being so generous with your time, first as Best Practice in our consortium studies and now at the conference.
See you there,
Carla