The way knowledge management should be understood – a new book recommendation

I first met Edna Pasher last year and was happy to receive a review copy of her new book with Tuvya Ronen, The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management: A Strategic Plan to Leverage Your Company’s Intellectual Capital. Here’s the review that I just posted at Amazon:

I have to admit that when I hear Knowledge Management, I used to think of the technical side of this discipline, the many experts I know in cataloging, storing, accessing and sharing knowledge, especially in its digital form.

This book is an effective reminder that the essence and the urgency of Knowledge Management is not in these technical skills but in the power of the people and shared experiences within organizations across the globe. The stories of successes and failures make a convincing case for the urgency of changing our management attitudes and practices.

It is so powerful because the book is built primarily on stories amassed over the fruitful careers of the two authors. The stories are synthesized in the accompanying text and through simple bullets at the end of each chapter. I’ll probably go back and review the bullets later but what sticks with me are the stories.

The authors don’t hit the reader over the head with this message—but the truth is that the process of knowledge management is actually subversive to industrial-era top-down practices. Rather than threatening us, the authors gently remind us the wisdom of shedding these old practices and adopting new ones that allow knowledge and innovation to flow freely—and fuel growth and the financial results that are still the measure by which business must be measured.

This is a great book that every modern manager should have by their desk—to pick up and flip to the applicable chapter when the old ways of doing business just aren’t panning out.

IC and KM – Building from the Bottom Up

Yesterday, I talked about how process can give your organization superpowers. These include processes that support value creation for customers and those that support the internal operations of the company. This list is pretty standard includes infrastructure, human resources, information technology and finance. Each of these functions has its own body of knowledge, competencies and processes. While they are part of the intangible capital of your organization, we won’t spend a lot of time on the details of these classic support systems because these functions are pretty mature.

One support process that is newer and therefore less standardized is knowledge management (KM). This was actually one of the earliest solutions offered by the market in response to the rise of the knowledge economy. The message was simple: If we live in a knowledge economy, we need to manage knowledge. Software and consulting companies sold a lot of people on the concept of KM driven by a faith that if people in an organization could just have access to all the knowledge of their peers, everyone would be smarter and more effective. As often happens with new trends (which always walk the line of fads…) a lot of people thought that this single business function would provide the answer to management in the knowledge era. Check the box and you are a modern company. Of course, this faith was misplaced. This book is a testament to the fact that knowledge and the management of knowledge is about more than a software program.

But that does not mean that KM is irrelevant. Read more

Call for Participants: Crossing the Chasm – Moving IC into the Business Mainstream, Hong Kong, November, 2010

I have been invited to lead a mini-track on moving IC into the business mainstream at the ICICKM 2010 in Hong Kong.  This is the 7th annual International Conference on Intellectual Capital, Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning and will be held on the 11th and 12th of November in Hong Kong.

There are a lot of good reasons to go: meet IC/KM professionals from all over the world, get a closer look at the very ambitious work being done in IC in China and, of course, participate in this conversation about mainstream adoption.

The track that I am organizing Crossing the Chasm: Moving IC into the Business Mainstream is going to focus on:

The move toward a global knowledge economy continues to accelerate. Yet, today, the average businessperson has only a vague understanding of IC, one of the key fields concerned with the business implications of this knowledge economy. Even those who have tried to apply the concepts struggle to make the connection between intangibles and their financial bottom line.

Although the field of IC continues to grow and develop, almost everyone in our community would agree that we labor in obscurity. This track seeks to explore how the IC community can move our field into the business mainstream. Case studies of successful IC projects are especially welcome.

Research issues as follows are of special interest:

• What are the barriers to mainstream adoption of IC concepts?
• What will it take to move IC concepts into the mainstream?
• What are the core concepts upon which mainstream adoption should be built?
• What are the benefits a businessperson can expect from an IC project?
• What is working in current IC practice?
• In this effort, are there lessons the IC world learn from the developments in web and enterprise 2.0?
• What is the right balance between top-down and bottom-up solutions to IC?
• What is the role of the “expert” in adoption of IC concepts in the mainstream?

Although this is an academic conference, you don’t need to write an academic paper:

The conference committee welcomes contributions on a wide range of topics using a range of scholarly approaches including theoretical and empirical papers employing qualitative, quantitative and critical methods. Case studies and work-in-progress/posters are welcomed approaches. PhD Research, proposals for roundtable discussions, non-academic contributions and product demonstrations based on the main themes are also invited.

I would love to have lots of case studies, work-in-progress posters and practitioner contributions. Here’s the call for contributions download.

Have an idea? Not sure how to get started? Please give me a call at 781-729-9650 or email me to talk it through.

I hope you will come and participate in our conversation and this great conference!

How can we use IT to optimize our Intellectual Capital?

I received a call the other day from the administrator of a good-sized Sharepoint implementation. He had actually fielded a number of requests from managers in his organization about how to use IT to optimize IC.

Wow. I love questions like that, especially since I have had a category on this blog since last year called IT=IC. They were thinking in terms of knowledge management. I think that’s a great place to start but doesn’t get to the most exciting part. That’s because knowledge in itself is not that big a deal. Read more