Nicholas Carr's recent book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains touches on an issue that APQC has been grappling with for several years--namely, that knowledge management is limited by the capacity of human attention, which many claim is being damaged by digital immersion, or excessive exposure to digital media.

One thing that hasn't changed with the onset of the Internet is the capacity of our short-term memories. According to research conducted by George A. Miller in the 1950s, an individual's short-term memory can hold only seven small "chunks" of information at a time, plus or minus two. If you use memory tricks to expand the size of each chunk, then you can increase the amount of information you can recall later, but that doesn't affect how much is in your short-term memory at any one time. It's still just seven chunks. No amount of technology can change that limitation.

In other words, your brain is like a big retail store. You have a massive amount of room in the warehouse, which is your long-term memory and knowledge, but there is very limited counter space, or short-term memory where conscious thought can take place. Whether you are pulling stuff out of the warehouse (using what you know) or shuffling things around on the counter (trying to multitask), your limitations are far greater than you think. Your mental counter space is small, and stuff is always falling off. You become aware of this when you walk into a room and can't remember why you came (because some other thought knocked the reason off the counter). And although multitasking may save time, experts say it can be draining on your brain's resources. As Laura Vanderberg, assistant director of the Time Management Consulting Program at Tufts University, points out, "It's 'mental counter space' and there's only so much of it."

Why does this matter to knowledge management? Because KM approaches should be designed with the assumption that people can't remember everything they know or once knew ("I don't know what I know until you ask me, and even then, I may have forgotten"). We need to capture information and lessons learned when they are fresh and make that knowledge available to others when and where they need it. KM exists because every employee can't know or remember everything, and our tools need to recognize that fact.

APQC's 15^th KM conference is next week, and if the registration is any indication, knowledge management is alive and well, and travel budgets are being released from their chokeholds. This conference is always a bellwether for The Next Big Thing in KM.  We'll have to wait until next week to be sure, but my sense from talking with the keynoters and presenters is that there are two hot top-of-mind topics right now.

The first is how KM can help (rather than simply lament) today's socially networked, information-overloaded knowledge workers with their digitally induced shrinking attention spans, their iPhone/BlackBerry obsessions, and their perception that they don't have time to stop and "do KM." This includes discovering unexpected applications of Enterprise 2.0 tools to enliven communities of practice;  finding the right way to incorporate Facebook-type functionality in a business setting; using analytics to make sense out of human behavior;  and finding the "KM app for that" for mobile devices. If Apple can have a 474 percent increase in Asian sales of the (three-year-old!) iPhone and its biggest non-holiday profit EVER, then you know KM better pay attention to what will go on that tiny little Apple appliance. Or Droid. Or Blackberry. All while keeping the bad guys from getting a peak at it.

The second Big Thing is a deeper desire to understand the roots of real knowledge and wisdom.  Good heavens--dare we go there?  American KMers often fear we will be dismissed as academic or irrelevant to business if we talk about things like wisdom or judgment. Hmm... How's that working for us?  We'll see next week if there is traction to be found there.

Every year, I swear that the content and camaraderie at the conference couldn't get any better, but it does. This year should be no different. See you there.

Over the past decade, organizations have been hard at work developing new and better ways to create and share knowledge. Technology has made it easier to collaborate and facilitated widespread access to information and expertise. Unfortunately, the ever-increasing amounts of knowledge at our fingertips do not seem to have improved our judgment. From top Wall Street firms to national governments, we can all name organizations that, despite their rich hoards of knowledge, have exhibited terrible judgment that has caused them to falter and resulted in catastrophic damage. 

If we accept that knowledge and judgment are not the same thing, then we must ask ourselves: What goes into good judgment? How are knowledge and judgment linked, and where do they diverge? And finally, why have so many enterprises failed to form sound judgments, despite their extensive knowledge?

There were some great keynote speakers at this year's KM World, but the biggest "a-ha" for me did not come from a speaker--it came from the exhibitors. Based on the number and excitement of vendors and attendees, the future of KM belongs to streaming video. Always too expensive previously, Web video is now literally in the hands of millions of people. YouTube and big bandwidth have made video a feasible and desirable medium for millions of "average" people to teach, learn, and share.

Web analytics firm ComScore released its data for online video usage in October 2009: Google/YouTube continues to dominate with over 125 million monthly viewers (and over 1 billion views per day). According to YouTube's blog, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Video has come of age as a primary way for people to share information, whether they're uploading a recording of baby's first steps or participating in populist journalism (CNN's iReports is a great example). The "show me, don't tell me" nature of video makes it far superior to text when you want to convey something physical (e.g., how to open a banana like a monkey).  Video is also terrific for communicating emotion. Now the buzz is to use it for a wide range of internal communications, rather than just the stiff annual CEO speech.

Cheap, immediate, with almost no barriers to use or distribution--why wouldn't you incorporate video into your KM approaches? 

On Thursday November 19, I will be joining a KMWorld 2009 conference panel to share thoughts on "Envisioning the Enterprise of the Future." My goal will be to identify the driving forces shaping the knowledge-based organization of the future. Three of these forces are in play today:

1.      Multiple Generations@ Work
2.      Social Computing & Networking
3.      Decline of Attention Span

All three reflect a chasm between what used to define "productive" and what may define it in the future.  One thing we know for sure: Every generation is more productive than the last one, despite the dire predictions.  Managers complain about "social not-working" and the lost time on the job while people update their friends on Facebook. Maybe they are right...or maybe not. How could social networking actually make us more productive? 

I will be thinking about that and related profundities between now and November 19. If you have any ephiphanies, let me know.

More information on the panel, including the other participants, is available here. Slides will be up on the KM world site for registrations in a few days.

Why and how to measure the impact of knowledge management are questions that never go away. A savvy reporter called me about this the other day. She said that she keeps hearing that people don't know how to measure KM. I admit that I find this upsetting given the amount of time APQC spends helping KMers do just that. It isn't always easy, but few things worthwhile are.

The holy grail of knowledge management measurement is to tie participation to outcomes. The more people participate in communities of practice, share information, use information, adopt practices, and so forth, the more we expect to see a correlation with business and mission outcomes. And we do.

But there is more to it than that.

Market intelligence is a commodity critical to corporate strategy planning. During APQC's June knowledge management community call, guest facilitator Dian Chu, a market intelligence specialist with Marathon Oil Corporation, will examine the framework of market intelligence and knowledge management used to achieve a competitive edge and why all companies should have such a framework. She'll also discuss the market intelligence and knowledge management cycle, critical success factors for effective KM, and the KM and market intelligence structure at Marathon.

The call will take place this Thursday, June 18, at 10:30 a.m. central time. Click here to register.

At APQC's KM conference earlier this month, I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Susan Leandri, PricewaterhouseCoopers' managing director of knowledge development services. Leandri's presentation, "Creating the 'Ah-ha' Moment: Engaging Leadership to Drive Cultural Change at PricewaterhouseCoopers," detailed how PwC has been working to accelerate change across the firm through various knowledge management initiatives.

At the end of the session, attendees were offered the opportunity to complete a self-assessment survey titled, "Are You Ready to Accelerate?" The survey, which includes a series of yes/no/not applicable questions, is designed to offer a snapshot of an organization's readiness to "create the ah-ha moment."

Leandri has generously offered to make this self-assessment available to our entire knowledge management audience. The survey is anonymous, and there is no cost to participate. All you need to do to get started is send an e-mail to pwc.km.diagnostic@us.pwc.com expressing interest in the survey offered by PwC at the APQC conference.

Lauren Trees beat me to the punch (not surprising) and was the first to post some short impressions from Day One of the conference. I composed mine in parallel and, after reading Lauren's post, do not see a great deal of overlap.

The Houstonian is a very good venue for the conference. Their service is excellent, they provide great food, the hotel is right next to APQC Headquarters (HQ for us military types), and the hotel has great Wi-Fi access (a must for those of us using netbooks or laptops to take notes). I used my Asus Eee PC 1000HE with super long battery life (at least eight hours) to take notes, but certainly could not keep up with most of the speakers so I also used my Livescribe Pulse Smart Pen to record audio so I can take more detailed notes later.  I will be working on those in my spare time in the weeks ahead and then will make them available via this blog.

It's taken me a while to gather my thoughts about day two of last week's knowledge management conference, but here are some notes on the final four keynotes:

• Rob Cross, associate professor at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce and research director of The Network Roundtable;
• John McQuary, vice president of KM and technology strategies at Fluor Corp.;
• Bryant Clevenger, global leader for IBM Global Business Services knowledge sharing strategy; and
• Alan  Deutschman, author of Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life.

As most of you know, APQC kicked off its 14^th annual knowledge management conference in Houston this morning. With so much knowledge sharing going on, it's only possible to scratch the surface in a blog post (even a rather long one), but here are some of the key insights and take-aways from the three keynotes.

APQC president Carla O'Dell got us off to a great start this morning. Given that she outlined many of the main points from her presentation in her latest blog post, I will not repeat all of them here, but I will mention a few ideas that stuck out for me.

Much has happened since APQC's last knowledge management conference in May 2008: We are well into the Big Recession and may bounce along the bottom for months; Barack Obama is president of the United States and, in addition to his many other attributes, has rock star status on YouTube; Twitter is now mainstream; and Facebook is a mainstay of soccer moms.

How has knowledge management fared in this uncertain and fast-moving environment? Not badly, and--if you use the cases to be presented this week at our 2009 KM conference as any barometer--the current recession has been a grand, if unplanned and unwelcome, opportunity for KM to show its value to leaner and more agile organizations.

The globally competitive business market has driven Fluor's need for knowledge sharing and collaboration across organizational and geographic boundaries. With knowledge management, we are able to bring together the best combination of our regional, industry, and technical expertise as well as our project management; financial; risk management; health, safety, and environmental; and business strengths to serve our clients' needs.

At Fluor, we take a true enterprise-wide approach to knowledge management. This requires an expanded mindset for deploying and maintaining communities beyond what is required when the KM approach is targeted to a segment of the company, is regional, or is not open to all employees. We have also adopted a broad definition of knowledge communities that includes the global network of people and a technology platform providing integrated content, expertise, and discussions. Every employee has access to every community, a rigorous community deployment process is followed, community performance measurement and auditing programs align communities with strategic business direction, and knowledge sharing behaviors are integrated into all aspects of company operations.

We reached the tipping point! After years of defining the knowledge transfer and learning (KT&L) program at Catholic Health Initiatives, documenting successes, and proving impact, KT&L has become recognized as a strategic capability and is now directly applied to organizational priorities.

The KT&L team developed core capabilities that are now applied to organizational priorities, resulting in accelerated performance improvement, time and cost savings, the transfer of expertise, and increased connectivity among people. These capabilities address the need for both explicit and tacit knowledge sharing.

According to the cliché, it's not what you know, but who you know, that matters. Like all clichés, this one overstates the case while also containing a measure of truth. Network connectivity plays a critical role in the performance of knowledge-based organizations and the way in which knowledge workers formulate strategy, make decisions, and both learn about and capitalize on opportunities. In fact, as much as 90 percent of the information that high-end knowledge workers receive and take action on comes from the people immediately around them. Yet these networks are often invisible, are not consciously built or tracked, and contain systematic biases that can lead to poor decisions, misguided strategies, ineffective investments, and incredible costs.

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.

I subscribe to Harvard Business Review (no, I don't have time to read all the articles). I have found some articles particularly useful and insightful, recommending them to protégés repeatedly, thus this list. The articles are available from the HBR Web site for about $7 each. I find it particularly useful to recommend these articles to protégés who do not have as much time to read as I do or cannot read as fast. I have organized the articles on this list along five broad themes.

1. Learning organizations
2. Leadership-specific skills
3. Challenges of being a chief executive officer
4. Decision making
5. Organizational insight

The link to my Amazon listmainia version of this is here.  (I will do a future post on the really cool tool I used to create the link, Tiny url). I have given very short descriptions of the articles in the list below. Longer descriptions are provided on the amazon.com version of the list.

Just as managers make sure that we do things right, leaders are responsible for ensuring that we do the right thing. Similarly, knowledge management helps us do things better, but strategic knowledge management (SKM) makes sure we invest in doing the right things for the right reasons.

The problem with traditional KM thinking and practice is that it is largely context-free in the way it is expressed. You either do it--or you don't. You either believe in the effectiveness and importance of KM or you are an unbeliever, and resistance leads to the traditional complaints of, "When will they get it?"  The irony is that KM literature rarely deals with the knowledge involved in the social pathology of organizational behavior. It consciously excludes serious discussion about the social psychology of organizations. And thus, it is perpetually surprised by what happens in implementation.

During APQC's December 2008 knowledge management community call, an audience poll showed that 22 percent of call participants expected a small increase in their 2009 knowledge management budgets and 35 percent expected no change, whereas 44 percent were anticipating some kind of decrease in their 2009 budgets. The discussion then shifted to ask how the audience members intended to protect their budgets. A second poll revealed that the biggest priorities for 2009 were to show tangible results and market those results to internal customers.

The results of these polls have led to many discussions here at APQC, both internally among our staff and with our customers. One such discussion occurred with the members of APQC's KM Advanced Working Group, in which we talked about whether the work they are doing is showing tangible results and whether their KM groups and staff are positioned to support their organizations during these tough economic times. The KM Advanced Working Group participants all believe that their knowledge management functions are aligned with organizational strategy, and each agreed that his or her KM function was positioned to support the enterprise through these tough economic times.

It's 2009--do you know where your KM is? Okay, so that was mostly just a lame attempt to say "Happy New Year!" to everyone. But really, where are your knowledge management efforts getting you? If it were up to me, KM would look and feel much like the social communities that we've modeled many knowledge-sharing practices after. Here's an example that I think embodies everything I'm trying to convey: It's the global positioning satellite receiver (or GPSr) community.

On behalf of everyone at APQC, I'd like to wish you a happy 2009! I hope you've all had a relaxing, enjoyable holiday season and are feeling rested and ready for the year ahead.

As some of you may remember, APQC's December KM community call focused on the 2008 Global Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) study, conducted by Teleos in association with The KNOW Network. We were joined by special guest presenter Rory Chase, managing director of Teleos, who provided an overview of the award's history and announced the 2008 global winners.  The call also included presentations by representatives from four of the 20 global winners: Carla O'Dell from APQC, Tom Barfield from Accenture, Dan Nerison from Fluor, and Susan Rosenbaum from Schlumberger.

With so much great material to cover, our presenters weren't able to answer all of your questions during the presentation. However, as we promised at the end of the call, we've compiled your questions and are posting the presenters' responses below. Thank you to everyone who participated in the call, and a special thank you to our presenters who took time out of the busy holiday season to write such thoughtful replies. We hope you find the answers helpful as you pursue your KM goals for the new year.

How will the current economic crisis affect 2009 knowledge management budgets and priorities?   Until now, no one has had the answer to this question.  On November 20, APQC's KM community came together during its monthly call to fill the void.  We anonymously polled everyone on the call (more than 80 people with every imaginable KM title) about how the economy is impacting their KM budgets and objectives for 2009. Here's what we found.

Lately, I've spent a fair amount of time waxing nostalgic about "past" knowledge management techniques and methods, mentioning what seems to be a resurgence of interest in them. Recent work with a client has caused me to bring an additional old KM standard to the forefront. So here's another "blast from the past" (don't worry, I won't ever go so far back as to break out the polyester suits and platform shoes). What is this technique dusted off from the KM toolkit? It's knowledge mapping.

I presume that, if you're reading this, you're already familiar with the technique. However, if you're not, a quick Internet search will provide you with lots of background on this simple but powerful tool. Recently, a team from APQC assisted a group from the supply chain function of a large manufacturer, one that has both Six Sigma and Lean philosophies in place. In spite of that, we were asked to help the organization--using knowledge mapping--since experience indicated that there was going to be a show-stopping problem in the very near future.

How are your knowledge management efforts affected by the current economic crisis? Are budgets being cut or refocused? What is the impact on your KM strategy and objectives for 2009? Join special guest facilitator APQC President Carla O'Dell for our next KM community conference call tomorrow, November 20, at 10:30 a.m. (central) to discuss how KM fares during tough economic times. The conversation will focus on how KM practitioners are dealing with belt-tightening and how they show value and protect their KM investments. Attendees should be prepared to answer anonymous polling questions.

It is brought home to me every time I take a long flight (which is far more often then anyone would like) how very few people read books and how very, very few read serious books. Without descending too far into anecdotage, I can easily remember taking flights where almost everyone was reading something or other, often serious fiction or a business book, not something about clever animals or eight bullets to change your firm. A few months ago I flew to Malaysia, and one fellow sitting across from me just stared straight ahead almost the whole flight--not even sleeping or meditating. I wanted to ask him what inspired such stupendous lassitude, but I realized I didn't really want to hear his answer.

In any case, I read all the time. I have done so since I was a mere lad, and I don't see how anyone can hope to offer useful help to any organization without doing so. It's one of the best investments in yourself you can make. Not the only one, but one of the most sustaining.

In this mode, let me alert you to three new books that have a real impact on many aspects of working with knowledge and learning. Books like this don't come along too often, and when they do they command attention.

One of our members is about to hire a chief knowledge officer (CKO) and asked APQC to supply some interview questions to put to the candidates.   Of course, we have no shortage of suggestions, but we decided to solicit input from our KM Edge group on LinkedIn, as well. Below are just three of APQC's suggestions as well as excerpts from the responses provided by members of our LinkedIn community. If you have additional suggestions, we would love to hear them--please post your thoughts in the comments section at the end of this entry.

While cleaning out some old digital folders, I found some PowerPoints from a decade ago (yes, they never die) offering advice that I no longer think is valid.  The old rules around knowledge sharing are being rewritten. Here are three--I'll bet you would add more.

Old Rule #1: People only share knowledge with people they know.

All you have to do is look at consumer reviews and personal blogs on the Internet to know that isn't true anymore. People work on virtual teams with people they have never met, coming from completely different cultures and generations.  But it still holds true that you need to create a common process and language or you can't get the work done. Everyone has to have the same playbook--and read it the same way.  Fluor, Air Products and Chemicals, and other global firms have been able to supply coherent project engineering only by having a standardized set of shared best practices.  In Fluor, these practices are maintained and updated by a global community of practice (headed by the organization's best people) for every engineering discipline. Which brings me to the next rule...

Having returned from a recent benchmarking workshop conducted in Europe by Carla O'Dell, it struck me as timely to mention an observation from that trip in connection to a report produced annually by Bain & Company regarding the use of management tools.

  As one of several thought leaders in various fields assembled by an international business school, Carla was asked to teach a group of high-achieving partners from a global professional services firm how to conduct benchmarking studies. The Bain & Company report (available here) shows that benchmarking usage has increased over the life of the survey to become, with the exception of strategic planning, the most frequently used management tool in North America, Europe, and Latin America. So far, so good!

Marc Aafjes, global head of knowledge management at Vodafone, has used his own blog to post a very effective summary of his breakout session presentation at this year's KM conference. In his post, Marc clarifies the concept of "the shadow organization" on which his presentation was focused:

By connecting various participants across the company around the execution of our knowledge strategy we're cultivating a meta network--the shadow organization--that enables the company to enhance the value we derive from the knowledge we have. Framing knowledge management in economic terms, the shadow organisation in effect is 'making the market for knowledge' by connecting otherwise disparate parts of the company around knowledge needs. This shadow organisation consists of the change agents that help us execute the knowledge strategy and embed sustainable change in all parts of the company.

Marc's post goes on to describe the five key groups within "the shadow organization" and highlight some of the benefits that this model has provided for Vodafone.

APQC has developed an organizing framework for an enterprise-wide approach to communities. This framework provides best practices across the entire CoP life cycle, from planning and positioning a community program to designing, launching, and sustaining effective communities.

Strategic Positioning

Strategic positioning for communities revolves around three elements essential to a successful enterprise-wide approach: a link to key business strategies, the formation of a core group to manage and deploy the CoP strategy, and a model for funding.  The strongest strategic position for a CoP program is at the sweet spot of business drivers (strategy), pain points (need), and passion (support).

APQC has found that the most effective communities are woven deeply into the fabric of the organization: functionally, by discipline, and by strategic issue. Most firms have established and positioned a formal core KM or community "center of excellence" with enterprise-wide scope whose charter is to promote CoP consistency, health, and economies of scale. In addition, APQC has found that business units and functions are assuming a major role in funding communities.

CoP Planning

Sometimes preceding strategic positioning is specific CoP planning, which builds the relationships, assessments, and business case for communities. Planning is also instrumental in engaging IT and other stakeholders in the process. Best-practice organizations use an explicit link to business strategy as a key criterion for determining which communities to support. Innovation--an important business objective for most companies--is also used as a criterion for establishing communities. Although creating innovation solutions or service lines is a key function of many communities, there is still a strong focus on sharing best practices, producing and refining documentation, and capturing lessons learned.

Design and Launch

The tools and methods for successfully designing and launching CoPs have become robust and repeatable. The roles of the community leaders and coordinators are more defined and more explicitly supported with training and mentoring.

Just as organizations have gone global, so have their communities. This means that technological, language, and cultural differences may need to be addressed.

Sustain and Evolve

Processes for sustaining and evolving communities have become robust, repeatable, efficient, and effective. Best-practice organizations recommend assessing community alignment with business and CoP goals annually. Most leading firms do not rely solely on automated tools for community metrics. Instead, they go to the source--the people--to determine what works, what doesn't, and what should be changed; they then calibrate this qualitative data with activity measurements from the system. APQC recommends using a combination of member satisfaction measures, knowledge-sharing activity measures, process measures, and business outcomes to assess the value of investments in communities.

Best-practice organizations use their measurement systems and tools to help manage the ongoing processes of communities. By watching leading indicators such as content "freshness," member participation, and "hits" on community Web pages, the CoP support groups can intervene quickly when problems arise. Finally, these groups also use their measurement tools and health assessments to determine when a CoP has run its natural course and warrants decommissioning.

APQC has been studying and implementing knowledge management (KM) approaches for 15 years, learning from the more than 400 organizations that have participated in our KM studies and working closely with dozens of others to implement the best practices.  If you're new to  

When embarking on a KM strategy or initiative, most organizations face the typical business questions that any good senior executive should ask about a new initiative, such as:

• Why should we do this (i.e., What is the business case)?
  
• Who is going to be responsible (i.e., What roles and resources are necessary)?
• How will we know if it makes a difference (i.e., How do you measure the results)?
  

Executives often have a vision of how solving their  knowledge problems will enhance the future success of the organization.  Link KM to their needs and vision, not some general plan to "make it easy for employees to share knowledge."

Lesson 2: Move Beyond "Knowledge for Knowledge's Sake"

The goal of KM is not to share knowledge for its own sake, although that is a valuable byproduct of the process.  Start with the business problems or opportunities, and identify the processes that seem to be the source of the "knowledge problem."  For example, we've seen issues ranging from repeated customer complaints about a process that doesn't get fixed, making the same mistake across business units, loss of knowledge due to retirement of key people, difficulties with bringing new people on board, or a lack of access to experts by sales people trying to make complex sales

Pick no more than three major projects to start. Build a business case or case for action based on measurable results.   And for heaven's sake, don't build an IT platform until you have a KM process that works. It's a waste of money and creates a scorched earth legacy that may cause future KM efforts to have a hard time growing.  Make the process work before you try to enable it with IT.              

Lesson 3:   Determine What Knowledge is Critical

Organizations are typically swimming in enormous amounts of tacit and explicit knowledge, only some of which is valuable and durable enough to offer future competitive advantage and justify the costs of retaining and transferring it. Building large repositories and content management systems to house all possible knowledge is a fruitless endeavor.

Knowledge comes in two basic varieties: explicit and tacit, also known as formal/codified and informal/uncodified knowledge. Explicit knowledge comes in the form of books and documents, formulas, project reports, contracts, process diagrams, lists of lessons learned, case studies, white papers, policy manuals, and so on. Some explicit knowledge may not be useful without the context provided by experience.

Tacit knowledge, by contrast, can be found in interactions with employees and customers.  Tacit knowledge is hard to catalog, highly experiential, difficult to document in detail, ephemeral, and transitory. It is also the basis for judgment and informed action. Organizations concerned about knowledge loss fear that tacit knowledge has not been captured (made explicit) or transferred so that others may benefit from it.

The KM approaches for managing explicit knowledge may be more mechanical; tacit knowledge is more difficult to capture and reuse. Some approaches, such as well-designed communities of practice, may address both types of knowledge. The trick is to determine exactly what and where the knowledge is and by what means it can be "captured" and transferred.

Lesson 4.  Knowledge is Sticky

Knowledge is sticky: Without a systematic process, dedicated people, and a robust infrastructure, it will not flow.  It is a mistake to adopt a KM approach (like communities of practice or an expertise location system) without first understanding the flow you are trying to enable. The first step in any KM initiative is to understand the desired knowledge flow. Once you know how and what knowledge needs to flow (and from and to whom), then you can enable the process with standard KM approaches such as communities of practice, transfer of best practices, techniques for mitigating knowledge loss due to retirement or turnover, sharing lessons learned, and so on.

Lesson 5.  If You Build It, They Will Not Necessarily Come 

Technology applications do not, in themselves, motivate people to share knowledge or to change behavior. Technology is indispensable to KM in modern organizations, but the road to effective KM is littered with abandoned "KM solutions" that were implemented too early. These vehicles quickly run out of gas, if they start at all. It is critical to select and implement technology as part of a larger, systematic KM change initiative, enabling a proven knowledge flow among people who are intrinsically motivated to share and learn from others.

Having said that, there are wonderful tools to enable collaboration and help maintain corporate memory and knowledge, from enterprise collaboration software to Web 2.0 applications such as wikis, blogs, and social networking solutions.   Use them wisely.

 
Lesson 6: Focus on Breaking Down Structural Barriers to the Flow of Knowledge Between People Who Have It and Those Who Need It--Not on Changing the "Culture"

Knowledge management is about enabling what most people want to do naturally--share what they know and learn from others. The barriers to sharing are often structural: There is not enough time, the process is cumbersome, people do not know the source or the recipients and are not sure they can trust the information, or people know instinctively that tacit knowledge is richer than documented explicit knowledge.

To ensure the success of KM initiatives, work on these barriers, rather than on the psychological makeup of your employees or your "culture."

Whenever possible, embed knowledge sharing, capture, and reuse into the work itself and provide value to those who participate in KM initiatives. Employees should experience greater professional development and find it easier to get their work done. Rewards and recognition are important, but they will not take the place of creating knowledge-sharing approaches that work and provide value to the people who use them.

Creating a knowledge-sharing culture is the result, rather than the prerequisite, of a successful KM strategy.

Lesson 7:  Measure

APQC stresses the importance of beginning with the organizational measures of success; in other words, understand the desired business outcomes and then work backward to design KM activities and measures that focus on those outcomes. 

APQC suggests measuring along the value chain continuum, starting with the inputs or costs, then measuring the participation/activity and correlating that with outputs and business outcomes. The APQC measurement framework shows the relationship among inputs (investments), process (KM-related activities and behaviors), and outcomes (organization objectives). Examples of inputs include time, salaries, and IT costs. Process changes might include cycle time, participation, and contribution to a body of knowledge. Examples of outcomes important to the organization might include employee and customer retention, reduced costs per transaction, or increased revenue. 

Measures also need to be appropriate to the particular KM approach, its objectives, and its stage of development. A KM approach primarily focused on communities of practice would measure costs and impact differently than one focused on using a content management system. A KM initiative whose goal is to improve sales force effectiveness would measure proposals and sales, but such measures would be irrelevant to an initiative focused on building new knowledge in an engineering discipline. 

For more information on measuring your KM efforts, see our articles:

• "Can You Measure the Value of Knowledge Management?"
• "Five Tips for Effective KM Measurement Systems"
• "KM Measurement: Tools and Resources"