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

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