If you followed me these past months, you probably noticed that I already wrote about Knowledge Management (KM). You can read for instance "Knowledge Management: Building a Better Battleship" or "Idea management may help validate knowledge management."
Today, we are looking to a complete guide about KM. It starts by -- yet -- another definition.
Unfortunately, there's no universal definition of KM, just as there's no agreement as to what constitutes knowledge in the first place. For this reason, it's best to think of KM in the broadest context. Succinctly put, KM is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Most often, generating value from such assets involves sharing them among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices. It's important to note that the definition says nothing about technology; while KM is often facilitated by IT, technology by itself is not KM.
Here are some questions answered by Darwin Magazine:
What constitutes intellectual or knowledge-based assets?
What benefits can companies expect from KM?
What are the challenges of KM?
Who should lead KM efforts?
What technologies can support KM?
This guide also describes some case studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art or the Ford Motor Company. It includes a list of Top Links, with the CIO Knowledge Management Research Center leading the pack -- which is hardly surprising considering that Darwin Magazine and CIO Magazine are sister publications.Finally, there are ten advises for getting people to adopt these KM tools and use them in an effective way.
The best recommendation -- in my experience -- is the first one: Start small. But the other ones are worth reading, like Let the users rule.
Source: Darwin Magazine, July 19, 2002
5:37:43 PM
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