Practising Knowledge Management

When people talk

about knowledge management (KM), it devolves into highly abstract and

philosophical statements. But there is a real world of KM–a world of budgets,

deadlines, office politics and organizational leadership. KM projects are

attempts to make practical use of knowledge to accomplish some organizational

objective through the structuring of people, technology and knowledge content.

These projects are appearing throughout the business world.

In  order to

understand how knowledge is really being managed in companies today, 31

different KM projects in 20 different firms were studied. In most companies,

only one project was addressed, but to get an in-depth look at KM in a single

organization, 10 projects were observed in one firm. Site visits were made to

four of the firms and the rest interviewed by telephone. The sources of

information were typically managers of knowledge projects, or of the KM function

across the organization. In addition, many of these firms were participants in a

research program on multiple aspects of KM.

Types of KM projects

Great variation

was found among the 31 projects. Some were self-funding, using a market-based

approach that charged users for knowledge services. Companies funded others out

of overhead. Some took a hybrid approach relying on corporate funding during

roll-out requiring a transition to self-funding after some period of time. A

centralized KM function managed or coordinated some projects while others

occurred in a more bottom-up and decentralized fashion. Where some initiatives

were fundamental to the very purpose and existence of a firm, others were

peripherals. Some defied economic justification and others generated revenue

from external customers.

In addition to defined

objectives, each had a person in charge of the effort, specific commitment of

financial and human resources and a focus on knowledge as distinct from

information or data. The projects also shared in common three broad types of KM

objectives–attempts to create knowledge repositories, improve knowledge

access, and improve knowledge cultures and environments.

Knowledge access and transfer

Another type of

project found was predicated on providing access to knowledge or facilitating

its transfer among individuals. Where knowledge repositories aim at capturing

knowledge itself, knowledge access projects focus on the possessors and

prospective users of knowledge. These types of projects acknowledge that finding

the person with the knowledge one needs and then successfully transferring it

from one person to another can be a daunting process. If the metaphor of a

library is useful for conceptualizing knowledge repository projects, then that

of ‘Knowledge Yellow Pages’ might best symbolize the purpose of knowledge

access projects.

Knowledge access projects vary in

their technological orientation. For example, several instances of companies

building and managing expert networks or maps of knowledge sources were

encountered.



At one company, the expert network was not an improvement targeted at some
segment of the operation but was actually the primary business.

The Yahoo model represents the

self-service model where the user is responsible for making all the selections,

while the other hand, the Amazon model is automated and based on the software

that comes in many flavors–collaborative filtering, statistical scoring, user

profiles, click-stream and rules-based logic. Both models have strengths and

weaknesses should be mixed and matched based on the target audience and business

purpose of your site. In the self-service model, the software shows no

intelligence and relies entirely upon user interaction, while the automated

model tries to anticipate user behavior without really understanding real world

situations.

Inadequacy in personalization

The

personalization logic proved incomplete during the holiday shopping period. If

you place an order for family members and friends with divergent tastes, the

site will assume that all the products are being bought for the logged on

customer’s personal use. So, even though you would not normally purchase ‘acid

rock’ music, the site will keep offering similar music CDs to you. The other

question currently is–how will the personalization software adapt to change in

user’s tastes with passage of time?

On the other hand, if the

self-service model were to be adopted, it goes to the other extreme and relies

completely on user input, providing little or no automation.

One of the good site designs and

personalization concepts is used by the home depot’s site–www.homedepot.com.

It gathers data about your objectives and goals as you browse. You can avoid

filling any forms if you wish. The content is categorized, based on a user’s

goals for coming to the site. Once you identify your goals by selecting one of

the tabs, the site pushes content in a seamless way and it never even appears

that the content is being pushed.

Beyond personalization

Personalization

is becoming the current hype of the web industry today. There are many first

generation players with products that will let you apply some sort of automated

content personalization. The most well known companies in this market segment

are–Andromedia, BroadVision and Net Perceptions. As always, in the race of ‘time

to market’, the first solutions were not tech-savvy but merely automated some

aspects of personalization. Most of the first generation tools still required

significant programming support, editorial staff and other members to make it

work. With many players involved in defining a solution based on personalized

content, the user is not guaranteed a great experience on the site that uses

these tools. With the potential of new tools attacking the same problem in a

different manner, it will be interesting to see the new solutions.

In a nutshell

Current

deployments of personalization represent a solid start. Care must be taken to

not just automate old methods of market analysis with the hope that it will give

better or different answers. In the quest to provide unique experience to every

individual visiting the site, one ends up intimidating the customer by collecting substantial quantities of data but is unsure of what to do with it.

With increased concern regarding customer privacy and the potential for

legislation, greater sensitivity to methods of collecting profile information

will be required. 

Rajeev

Nanda