Making Knowledge Management Work on your Intranet

In the information economy, the longevity of an organisation is based as much on the sophistication of its knowledge management practices as it is on traditional differentiators such as the strength of its products, the talent of its employees, and its marketplace reputation and partner relationships. Simply speaking, as actionable and insightful information becomes the currency of an organisation, there are few other ways to tap into any latent potential lost in the office corridors.

Singh, Shiv. Boxes and Arrows (2004). Articles>Knowledge Management>Intranets>Usability

The Nonsense of 'Knowledge Management'  

Examines critically the origins and basis of 'knowledge management', its components and its development as a field of consultancy practice. Problems in the distinction between 'knowledge' and 'information' are explored, as well as Polanyi's concept of 'tacit knowing'. The concept is examined in the journal literature, the Web sites of consultancy companies, and in the presentation of business schools. The conclusion is reached that 'knowledge management' is an umbrella term for a variety of organizational activities, none of which are concerned with the management of knowledge. Those activities that are not concerned with the management of information are concerned with the management of work practices, in the expectation that changes in such areas as communication practice will enable information sharing.

Wilson, T.D. Information Research (2002). Articles>Knowledge Management

Three Considerations for Enterprise 2.0

Continuing my discussions about practical approaches to enterprise 2.0, I’ve been observing and thinking about a range of adoption patterns. Like any new technology, there are many successes, and at least as many failures. For organisations looking to benefit from enterprise 2.0, we obviously want successes. From where I stand, there are three main considerations when conducting strategic planning.

Robertson, Stephen. Step Two (2008). Articles>Knowledge Management>Intranets

Collaborative Knowledge Gardening

With Flickr and del.icio.us, social networking goes beyond sharing contacts and connections.

Udell, Jon. InfoWorld (2004). Articles>Knowledge Management>Metadata>Social Networking

Intranets and Knowledge Sharing

This article challenges the vision of the corporate intranet as a publishing tool, or a static repository for web pages or documents. Instead, it looks at a number of ways in which the intranet can become a dynamic and living environment for knowledge-based activities.

Robertson, James. Step Two (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Knowledge Management

Intranets Look Vainly to Knowledge Management

I have been watching the knowledge management boom for 15 years. I would love to belive that knowledge management was a valuable field. But to the extent that it's about capturing "knowledge" in documents, it goes against everything I know about successful organisations. Like artificial intelligence, it seems based on a mistaken idea about what knowledge is, and about how knowledge-based economies function.

Shorewalker (2004). Articles>Web Design>Intranets>Knowledge Management

Taking Information Into Your Own Hands: Critical Issues in the Design and Implementation of Employee Self-Service

How can an organization empower its employees, reduce costs and improve data quality? Implementing employee self-service tools is one direction that a number of leading companies are turning to as they look to build win-win propositions with their most important assets: their people.

Di Ferdinando, Bridgette, Eric Lesser and Tomer Amit. IBM (2004). Articles>Web Design>Knowledge Management>Intranets

Technology Transfer: An Unparalleled Opportunity for Technical Writing Professionals    

This nation does not effectively transfer expensively acquired knowledge into cost-effective, labor-saving tools and processes.

Roberts, Suzanne S. IEEE PCS (1991). Articles>Knowledge Management>Technical Writing>Technology Transfer

Using RDF for Knowledge Management

Using new tools, RDF can be used for knowledge management, maintaining all the data’s relations, automatically building tables for RDBMS deployment, and supporting graphical navigation, multiple navigation trees, and linking across diverse content sets.

Sperberg, Roger and Rajeev Voleti. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Knowledge Management>XML>Metadata

The Use of XML to Express a Historical Knowledge Base   

Since conventional historical records have been written assuming human readers, they are not well-suited for computers to collect and process automatically. If computers could understand descriptions in historical records and process them automatically, it would be easy to analyze them from different perspectives. In this paper, we review a number of existing frameworks used to describe historical events, and make a comparative assessment of these frameworks interms of usability, based on 'deep cases' of Fillmore ’score grammar. Based on this assessment, we propose a new description framework, and have created a microformat vocabulary set suitable for that framework.

Nakahira, Katsuko T., Masashi Matsui and Yoshiki Mikami. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Knowledge Management>XML>History

Medical and Pharmaceutical Writers Must Use Knowledge Management Tools To Create Their Documents

Full-time writers in the life sciences must see themselves as much more than just writers. Writers must see themselves as knowledge managers, not merely the managers of data or the “shapers” of information. Writers must make use of knowledge management tools to help them represent the explicit, and more importantly, the tacit knowledge of a development or research project.

Cuppan, Gregory. Brainery.net (2009). Articles>Knowledge Management>Regulatory Writing

Musings: What do you Mean Knowledge Management and Negotiating Meaning in Technical and Scientific Reports

"Meaning must be negotiated and confirmed." This is an important concept not just for developing a working definition for a term like knowledge management, but it is also an approach critical to the conveyance of knowledge in scientific and technical report.

Cuppan, Gregory P. Brainery.net (2009). Articles>Knowledge Management>Scientific Communication

Information Technologies as Discursive Agents: Methodological Implications for the Empirical Study of Knowledge Work    

Work activities that are mediated by information rely on the production of discourse-based objects of work. Designs, evaluations, and conditions are all objects that originate and materialize in discourse. They are created and maintained through the coordinated efforts of human and non-human agents. Genres help foster such coordination from the top down, by providing guidance to create and recreate discourse objects of recurring social value. From where, however, does coordination emerge in more ad hoc discursive activities, where the work objects are novel, unknown, or unstable? In these situations, coordination emerges from simple discursive operations, reliably mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs) that appear to act as discursive agents. This article theorizes the discursive agency of ICTs, explores the discursive operations they mediate, and the coordination that emerges. The article also offers and models a study methodology for the empirical observation of such interactions.

Swarts, Jason. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2008). Articles>Knowledge Management>Project Management>Technology

Catalyzing Innovation and Knowledge Sharing    

Generation Y are the first generation to fully put the process of ‘prosumption’ into practice. Individuals are proactively seeking to generate and share creative outputs as a result of their online activities, and this produces a set of fundamental questions for business librarians, information management specialists and consultants: does our profession adhere to a logic of service-delivery, which is rapidly becoming obsolete in the context of service-innovation. Suggestions for how information specialists (called librarian 2.0 in this article) can participate in the creation of value for users are offered.

Cullen, John T. Business Information Review (2008). Articles>Management>Knowledge Management>Information Design

Competitive Advantage and its Conceptual Development    

This article explores the competitive advantage of businesses. Current understanding of competitive advantage arises from the strategic management paradigm. However, the early theory that underpins this comes from optimising economic theory, the inadequacy of which led to the resource-based view. The next development came from knowledge management, which sees knowledge as a valuable strategic resource recognizing the need to look more inside the organization qualitatively. However, a new paradigm has arisen that couples knowledge processes with cybernetics. This recognizes that achieving competitive advantage requires that an organization’s pathologies must be recognized and addressed.

Yolles, Maurice. Business Information Review (2009). Articles>Management>Knowledge Management

Design Partners: Passing on the Knowledge of UX

The two main drivers for a successful relationship were to respect each other’s opinion and to use active listening to understand what the other was saying.

Richkus, Rebecca. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>Knowledge Management>User Experience>Collaboration

Communities of Practice: Optimizing Internal Knowledge Sharing

The key to intranet success is to provide value to employees and give them a reason to visit the site repeatedly. One of the primary ways to achieve this is to connect employees with the people and groups with whom they need to collaborate. Workgroups, or communities of practice, provide the basis for a living, growing, vibrant space in which people can access the information they need, share best practices, and contribute to a shared knowledge base. This article discusses the role of communities of practice within organizations and provides a framework for planning research and design activities to maximize their effectiveness.

Hawley, Michael. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Knowledge Management>Intranets>Organizational Communication

Interview with Patrick Lambe: “Real Value Comes from Building Relationships”

An enormous amount of knowledge resides within international organizations. But how can the knowledge management (KM) team unlock this information and make it available to a large number of employees around the globe? How much knowledge should actually be shared and what kind of experience should not be passed on because it might hinder innovation and creative thinking? In an interview with tcworld KM expert Patrick Lambe answered these and many other questions.

Melville, Corinna. TC World (2009). Articles>Interviews>Knowledge Management>Organizational Communication

Sharing Knowledge Across Borders

As companies have their offices spread across more and more geographic locations and a large scale of employees working in different countries, it becomes even harder to represent a single organization as one unique entity. The key lies in raising awareness for the company’s vision and mission as well as equipping staff in all locations with the latest technologies. Advancements in communication technology have led to a deeper focus on knowledge management activities – benefiting both the organization and the individual.

Ramamurthy, Ramesh. TC World (2009). Articles>Knowledge Management>International>Organizational Communication

The Fog of Information 

In our world, information comes at us from all sides with the same lack of wholeness or trustworthiness. News outlets twist assumptions and conclusions to pander to their audience’s political predispositions. Social networks include feedback from all types of personalities with some good and some self-serving, and some just plain erroneous information. Companies provide product information scattered across knowledgebases, web sites, forums, and formal documentation with a corporate bias aimed at the prospective sale. Emails clog up our inboxes and authenticity is at a premium. The result is an overload of questionable information and little functional knowledge.

Hiatt, Michael. Mashstream (2007). Articles>Knowledge Management>Content Management

Drinking or Drowning in the Information Confluence 

Data given context is information, and information put to use is knowledge. With that definition, the idea that more and better access to all forms of information does not necessarily mean we are getting more and better knowledge to help us through our daily lives. With real knowledge as the goal, independent information sources need to be united to provide better comprehension of the world around us. Knowledge that instills a higher level of organization and understanding of topics relevant to our lives is the ultimate goal. It’s not the quantity of information, but the quality of the knowledge that we need.

Mashstream (2007). Articles>Knowledge Management>Information Design