Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management can be defined a multitude of ways depending on the organization's needs. Knowledge Management should focus on both tacit knowledge in people's heads as well as explicit knowledge found in the sea of documents, websites and libraries that exist in companies today.

Knowledge Management touches many parts of internal operations - Corporate Communication, Learning & Development and Information Technology. The efforts of capturing, validating (if needed), sharing, re-using and building new knowledge are the crux of knowledge management. Connecting people to people is critical to a successful knowledge management program.

My Experience: I have more than five years experience directly managing a knowledge management function with an additional 10 years integrating knowledge management activities within a learning & development function. I have led efforts to capture tacit knowledge and create processes to move knowledge from person to person, including best-practice validation processes, communities of practice and knowledge gap assessments.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

The explicit side of knowledge management, Enterprise Content Management, can refer to the managing of documents, web elements, video/audio, and even records management. Records Management has some key differences and commonalities with Knowledge Management.

A key part of ECM is setting information architecture...determining what content goes into what store is essential to helping true usability and findability of information. Creating logical and flexible taxonomies, search capabilities, meta data tagging, and specifying versioning rules and content life cycles are critical to any ECM strategy.

My Experience: I have led enterprise-wide efforts to define document and web content management needs to increase findability of information and improve productivity. I have also created taxonomies to reflect a culture's common vocabulary and implemented enterprise search tools with great results.

Social Media

The newest channel on the scene, Social Media can help make tacit knowledge explicit. Social tools can engage employees to collaborate and share on an ongoing basis through very simple interfaces. While some argue that social tools add to the already complicated content management landscape, this can be solved with clear rules and governance around when to use social tools and when to use formal content management tools.

My Experience: I have integrated social tools, such as blogs, wikis, team workspaces and peoplefinders, behind the firewall to maximize virtual collaboration efforts and engage employee populations. I have also defined elements for internal corporate policy to properly use these type of tools to the benefit an organization.

Intranets

So, how do people access all of this? Intranets tend to align Corporate Communication and knowledge Management functions for a common purpose because intranets are best used for internal communication, content and tool management and collaboration space access all in one location.  Intranet design should be tackled by a cross-functional team of Corporate Communication, Knowledge Management and Information Technology.

My Experience: I have re-designed and managed an enterprise-wide intranet for a national real estate company. Defining use cases, analyzing business needs and managing a MOSS 2007 strategy all contributed to a successful roll-out and improved productivity.

Change Management

At the beginning of building these strategies, how one manages the change needs to be taken into consideration from the outset. Involving senior leadership and having champions, holding focus groups and working commitees comprised of actual users and ensuring all the affected stakeholders are at the table initially lay the foundation for change management. During the testing and roll-out phases of any kind of implementation, these are the keys critical to success:

My Experience: I have 15 years experience managing behavior change in the form of new training, processes, technology and tools implementations. I have practiced the keys above with great success and believe to never shortcut these steps to ensure successful change every time.