Are you familiar with "Knowledge Management" (KM)? What is it?
Let's start with a definition taken from the TechWeb Encyclopedia:
An umbrella term for making more efficient use of the human knowledge that exists within an organization. Knowledge management is the 21st century equivalent of information management. It is essentially an industry trying to distinguish itself with specialized groupware and business intelligence (BI) products that offer a wide range of solutions.
The major focus of knowledge management is to identify and gather content from documents, reports and other sources and to be able to search that content for meaningful relationships.
Now that you know what KM is, you're ready for this very interesting article from CIO Magazine about how the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) implemented its KM system.
CIO Magazine even provides an "Executive Summary". Here it is:
Because the requisition of a U.S. Navy ship or warfare system takes several years, the organization in charge of that process, the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), developed best practices to reduce the money and time spent during the acquisition life cycle. It's hard to retain those best practices, however, since NAVSEA invariably loses employees to retirement or new tours of duty during the years it takes to build a naval vessel. A knowledge management database was the answer. But Navy culture emphasizes information confidentiality and internal competition, so sharing information did not come naturally to NAVSEA's 45,000 employees. NAVSEA succeeded by ensuring an immediate reward for sharing knowledge in each best practice area: an easier way to get tasks done. For steadfast resistors, NAVSEA made it impossible for them to work with anyone else without giving up their own piece of information.
Intrigued? Go further and read the whole story.
Source: Stephanie Overby, CIO Magazine, May 1, 2002 Issue
5:57:14 PM
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