So what is a knowledge management system and what is the big fuss about these BI (business intelligence) systems these days? Would you also like users to be self-trained (as IT training budgets have been cut)?
IT's role has been changing in last few years and we now see a shift happening in the industry. IT has now started to focus more on "Information" rather than technology (at least in the companies that I know of). Does anyone care about cloud computing?
In this post I am going to discuss some key characteristics of a knowledge management system.
As we all know, knowledge levels can range from being
- Unrelated data (or information) to
- Documented procedures & processes or
- Having readily accessible knowledge experts, who have tacit knowledge (as opposed to having explicit knowledge - codified tacit knowledge).
The information/knowledge can be captured
- actively (e.g. humans writing business process, procedures etc.) or
- passively (systematically).
Also, Knowledge application (or re-use) can be accomplished either
- by having it embedded in the system(s) or
- by involving humans to proactively participate, innovate and integrate various building blocks of the knowledge system.
In summary, Knowledge management system comprises of capture, retention, and application of the knowledge.
Knowledge management system is best optimized by intertwining technology, organization and business processes (www.terrigriffith.com). Collecting knowledge passively and enabling employees to have an access to tacit knowledge/expertise is the best bet for improving success of a knowledge management system.
The BI systems of today (built on top of knowledge systems) help organizations passively collect information from the existing transactional applications using ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) techniques and present the information via data marts, portals or enterprise reporting tools (depending upon information delivery requirements). This allows companies to have better visibility into various processes and information assets so that business leaders can make informed decisions in a timely manner.
In addition, the new enterprise 2.0 collaboration solutions help streamline expertise and knowledge discovery. Designed to leverage the expertise, personal network, and unpublished information of employees, new tools allow organizations to quickly deploy a solution that doesn’t suffer from the “adoption challenges” of traditional knowledge management software.
Knowledge management is best used when embedded in work processes. This greatly reduces need for extensive IT training (of course, ease of use in the systems will greatly help as well). Expecting users to consult standalone knowledge management systems (in their spare time) actually reduces employees’ effectiveness, and if you have loads of money to spend on IT training and keep the documents updated, then force be with you!!!
Passively collected knowledge is the best form of knowledge capture as the humans don't have to spend extra effort on the knowledge capture. Using the latest collaboration infrastructures, corporations can provide easy access to tacit knowledge available in the company.
If you have implemented a knowledge management system (or a BI system) in your company recently or plan to implement one in future, I would like to hear your thoughts...
1 month ago
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