Creation Enablers

Organizations will never stop learning and creating new knowledge, and in a similar fashion strategies for managing organizational knowledge will continuously evolve to help address the challenges associated with fulfilling its mission. This section will outline a strategy that organizations can implement to manage their knowledge and overcome the challenges discussed above.

Infrastructure
Building a robust infrastructure will allow knowledge to be leveraged through common systems and technology platforms. The core components of this infrastructure should be:

• Common Communications infrastructure – A common communications infrastructure can mean things as simple as a standard organizational vocabulary, electronic mail, all the way to virtual private networks, and cohesive distributed systems
• Access to information/knowledge sources – Knowledge whether personal or collective has value only when it is accessible. An important aspect of knowledge creation cycles is the “serendipity factor” – making connections with/to information that seemingly have no connection. Through the serendipity factor we can create and use new forms of knowledge and speed its deliver throughout the organization.
• Codifiable Knowledge Sharing Mechanisms – This is the slam dunk from a systems point of view. Once forms of codified or codifiable knowledge have been identified, they are generally easy to make available for dissemination and reuse.
• Experiential Knowledge Sharing Mechanisms – This area of infrastructure is quite a bit more “fuzzy”. All organizations implementing Knowledge Management systems encounter great difficulty in the area of experienced leverage.

Some of the mechanisms that can be used to capture, disseminate, and reuse know-how are:

• An organizational vocabulary (taxonomy) – A unifying mechanism is a common context. In order to build a common context, all members of the community need to “talk” the same language. An organizational vocabulary (that is created, disseminated, and maintained) can and will provide that context.
• Collaboration tools – Collaboration tools can be as simple as email (in small group settings), synchronous and asynchronous discussion tools, video conferencing, desktop video conferencing, etc. Collaborative systems provide the ability to build and maintain a sense of community within the context of the organization as a whole, and within departments and workgroups (teams). They also provide a mechanism for aggregating know-how nuggets and making them available to the organization as a whole.
• Communities of Practice and Interest — Some may not view this as an infrastructure component, but creating a sense of community within the organization is an important mechanism for enabling the knowledge creation cycles.

Aggregation
Knowledge aggregation entails collecting information from workgroups (functional & cross-functional teams, departments, divisions, subsidiaries, customers, suppliers, etc.) and validating and packaging it for reuse in a “knowledge mart”.

The aggregation and validation of codified knowledge would be disseminated via the codified knowledge repositories discussed in Experiential Knowledge Sharing Mechanisms above.

Knowledge aggregation is important because it allows us to take what we already know and apply it in new and possibly unique ways. It also keeps us in many cases from recreating the wheel, which ultimately will allow us to increase our return on investment with marginal effort (financial or human).