1. Define knowledge management and describe its purposes.
Knowledge management (KM) is the systematic and active management of ideas, information, and knowledge residing in an organization’s employees.
Its purposes include effective and efficient problem solving, dynamic learning, strategic planning, and decision making. KM initiatives focus on identifying knowledge, explicating it in such a way that it can be shared in a formal manner, and leveraging its value through reuse.
2. Distinguish between knowledge and data.
Knowledge and data are related through information, which is also defined in this answer.
Data are facts, measurements, and statistics.
Information is organized or processed data that is timely (i.e., inferences from the data are drawn within the time frame of applicability) and accurate (i.e., with regard to the original data).
Knowledge is information that is contextual, relevant, and actionable.
(The conventional definition of actionable is “giving reason for legal action, such as slander.” If you accept that meaning for the term, you may prefer an alternative phrase here. However, since no single English word means “providing a practical basis for management action,” the term actionable is increasingly used in that sense today even though some still consider it incorrect.)
3. Describe the knowledge-based economy.
A knowledge-based economy is one in which the primary resource used to produce economic benefits is knowledge—as distinct from land, capital, energy or any other resource. One difference between knowledge and these other resources is that knowledge can be shared without diminishing, and can actually increase as a result of such sharing. Knowledge is also easier to transfer than are other resources, making laws and barriers difficult to apply and reducing the effect of location. Also, knowledge can have widely different values to different people, or even to the same person at different times.
(The term “knowledge-based economy” was first popularized, if not invented, by Peter Drucker as the title of Chapter 12 in The Age of Discontinuity (1969). Business students should recognize Drucker as one of the great management thinkers of the 20th century.)
4. Define tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge is knowledge that has been or can be articulated, codified, and stored. It deals with objective, rational and technical information in manuals, documents, procedures, software, and even stories (though this last is less common in business).
Tacit knowledge has been described as “know-how,” as opposed to the “know-what” and “know-why” of explicit knowledge. It is often highly personal and difficult to formalize, and deals with subjective, cognitive and experiential learning. Some tacit knowledge could be made explicit if the person holding the knowledge recognized the value of doing so, but in other cases it is difficult to codify (such as knowing how to ride a bicycle). Capturing and sharing tacit knowledge is a more difficult knowledge management task than is capturing and sharing explicit knowledge.
5. Define KMS and describe the capabilities of KMS.
The term KMS, or knowledge management system(s), refers to the use of modern information technology to systematize, enhance and expedite knowledge management inside and outside a firm.
KMS capabilities include capturing knowledge, storing it, allowing users to search the system for relevant knowledge, and making knowledge available to them. Some KMS use specific technologies for these purposes and some add additional features (e.g., the ability to contact a person who stored certain knowledge in the system with a question about it) but those are the basic conceptual elements.
6. Define learning organization and identify the characteristics of learning organizations.
A learning organization is one that is able to learn from its past experience. A learning organization performs these five activities well: solving problems systematically, experimenting creatively, learning from past experience, learning from the best practices of others, and transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization.
7. Define organizational memory.
Organizational memory is the way an organization brings knowledge from the past to bear on its present activities. This requires a way to save, represent and share knowledge, often but not necessarily a KMS.
8. Describe organizational learning.
“The development of new knowledge and insights that have the potential to influence an organization’s behavior.”
9. Define organizational culture and relate it to knowledge management.
Several definitions are possible:
“A pattern of shared basic assumptions [based on] learning over time what works and what doesn’t work, which become second nature.”(edited for continuity of excerpts)
“The specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization … From organizational values develop organizational norms, guidelines or expectations that prescribe appropriate kinds of behavior by employees in particular situations and control the behavior of organizational members towards one another.” (Hill, C. W. L., and G. R. Jones, Strategic Management (5e), Houghton Mifflin, 2001)
Culture is related to knowledge management because knowledge management, to be successful, must be accepted by members of an organization. Their willingness to do this, the causes of possible resistance, and the methods by which they can be motivated to overcome resistance all depend on the organization’s culture. This is true to some degree of any change, but especially of an effort to introduce something like knowledge management that has little obvious near-term benefit but has all the drawbacks.
10. Why do companies need knowledge management initiatives?
For two basic reasons: knowledge management is beneficial, and it won’t happen by itself.
Knowledge management is more beneficial today than in the past because of increasingly intense competition, the global marketplace, and (in part due to these two) increased personal job mobility.
11. Describe the process of knowledge creation.
Knowledge creation is the generation of new insights, ideas, or routines. It is an interplay between tacit and explicit knowledge, a growing spiral as knowledge moves among the individual, group, and organizational levels. There are four modes of knowledge creation:
• Socialization: converting tacit knowledge to new tacit knowledge through social interactions and shared experience among organization members.
• Combination: creating new explicit knowledge by merging, categorizing, reclassifying, and synthesizing existing explicit knowledge.
• Externalization: converting tacit knowledge to new explicit knowledge.
• Internalization: creating new tacit knowledge from explicit knowledge.
12. What are the characteristics of knowledge sharing?
• It takes place when there is trust, interest, and shared language.
• It requires access to knowledgeable members of the organization.
• It requires a culture “marked by autonomy, redundancy, requisite variety, intention, and fluctuation.”
13. Define knowledge seeking (or sourcing).
“The search for, and use of, internal organizational knowledge.”
14. Define the process approach to knowledge management.
The process approach attempts to codify organizational knowledge through formalized controls, processes, and technologies. It frequently uses IT in forms such as intranets and data warehousing.
(Note that this question opens with “Define,” while the next one opens with “Describe.” This can be taken as an effort to vary the phrasing or as a deliberate request for different types of answers. The answers presented here are both brief descriptions. If you have more specific requirements, it might be well to make them explicit.)
15. Describe the practice approach to knowledge management.
The practice approach to knowledge management assumes that the vast majority of organizational knowledge is tacit and that formal controls and processes are not effective in their transfer. The focus of this approach is to build communities of practice.
16. Why is a hybrid approach to KM desirable?
Because both the practice approach and the process approach have drawbacks. By using each where it is most appropriate, typically evolving from a practice approach to a process approach, the advantages of both can be obtained while minimizing the impact of their drawbacks.
17. Describe best practices as they relate to knowledge management.
There are two possible, and very different, interpretations of this question: (a) What are best practices in knowledge management? and (b) How can KM help an organization disseminate and implement best practices as they relate to its operations? If you have one of these in mind, you may want to make your requirements known to students.
Much of the chapter, both what has gone before and what is to come, addresses the first interpretation of this question. The current section’s “Best Practices” subsection addresses the second. It points out that early knowledge repositories listed best practices and made them available within a firm, and that on-line, Web-accessible repositories can have a wide-ranging impact on the use of knowledge throughout it. It further categorizes the best practices that can be put into a repository into four levels, from lowest to highest:
1. A good idea that is not yet proven but makes intuitive sense.
2. A good practice that has improved business results.
3. A local best practice for all or part of the organization based on hard data.
4. An industry best practice, similar to the third level but using hard data from industry.
18. Define knowledge repository and describe how to create a knowledge repository.
A knowledge repository is a database in an informal sense, though not in the formal sense of database management systems. It is an electronic storehouse of knowledge which is often text based and may have widely varying characteristics. Its structure will depend on its purpose, the type(s) of knowledge it stores, and the way that knowledge is represented.
There are three ways to create a knowledge repository: to develop a custom Internet-based system, to purchase a document management system, or to purchase a knowledge management package. Whichever of these is chosen, it is important to make contributing knowledge easy for the contributor and to have a good way to catalogue the knowledge it will contain.
19. Describe the KMS cycle.
The KMS cycle has the steps listed below.
1. Create knowledge.
2. Capture knowledge.
3. Refine knowledge.
4. Store knowledge.
5. Manage knowledge.
6. Disseminate knowledge.
20. List and describe the components of KMS.
Components of KMS include communication, collaboration, and storage and retrieval.
21. Describe how AI and intelligent agents support knowledge management.
Artificial intelligence supports knowledge management by doing the following:
• Assist in and enhance searching knowledge (e.g., intelligent agents in Web searches)
• Help establish knowledge profiles of individuals and groups
• Help determine the relative importance of knowledge when it is contributed to and accessed from the knowledge repository
• Scan e-mail, documents, and databases to perform knowledge discovery, determine meaningful relationships, glean knowledge, or induce rules for expert systems
• Identify patterns in data (usually through neural networks)
• Forecast future results by using existing knowledge
• Provide advice directly from knowledge by using neural networks or expert systems
• Provide a natural language or voice command–driven user interface for a KMS
Intelligent agents support knowledge management by learning what the user prefers to see and how the user organizes it. Then, the intelligent agent takes over to provide that information at the desktop, just as a good administrative assistant would.
22. Relate XML to knowledge management and to knowledge portals.
One of the challenges in knowledge management is selecting a good, common representation of knowledge embedded in documents. Extensible Markup Language (XML) assists in meeting this challenge by enabling standardized representations of data structures, so that data can be processed appropriately by heterogeneous systems without case-by-case programming. Thus, XML-based messages can be taken from back-end repositories and fed out through the portal interface. Wide adoption of XML can help solve the problem of integrating data from disparate sources. Due to its potential to simplify systems integration, XML may become the universal language of all portal vendors.
23. Define knowware.
Technology tools (for all practical purposes, software) to support knowledge management. (The term was coined by analogy to hardware, software, middleware, etc. While it was by no means invented for this book, it has yet to gain widespread use. A Google search for knowware in Dec. 2006 got 83,300 hits, compared with over 14 million for middleware and nearly 40 million for firmware.)
24. Describe the major categories of knowledge management tools.
The seven major categories of knowledge management tools are:
• Collaborative computing tools, for transferring knowledge within an organization
• Knowledge servers, for storing and providing access to a knowledge repository
• Enterprise knowledge portals: see answer to Question 3 below
• Electronic document management: see answer to Question 4 below
• Knowledge harvesting tools: see answer to Question 5 below
• Search engines, for finding knowledge in a repository
• Knowledge management suites: see answer to Question 6 below
25. Define EKP.
An Enterprise Knowledge Portal. EKPs provide convenient access to an organization’s body of stored knowledge, while a server handles document and knowledge management parts of a KMS.
26. Define EDM and relate it to knowledge management and to CMS.
Electronic Document Management. Since much knowledge is stored in the form of unstructured documents of various types, and EDM is designed to manage such documents, they are a natural fit.
EDM systems are related to Content Management Systems (CMS) because CMS is simply a new approach to EDM that includes features for versioning (keeping track of various versions of a document) and to reflect business rules in document management activities.
27. Describe tools for knowledge harvesting.
Knowledge harvesting is the process of capturing knowledge from users with minimal involvement or activity on their part. Such tools analyze documents of specific types, such as e-mail or word processing, for content that indicates knowledge. They then use this information either to store the document as knowledge or to categorize the document’s originator as a source of knowledge.
28. List the major systems that are frequently integrated with KMS.
KMS integrate communications, collaboration, and storage systems.
29. Describe the role of the CKO.
The Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) is responsible for all knowledge management-related activities that go on in an organization. (See the “Teaching Tips” section of this manual for more on the use of this title.) Specifically, a CKO should:
• Set knowledge management strategic priorities
• Establish a knowledge repository of best practices
• Gain a commitment from senior executives to support a learning environment
• Teach information seekers how to ask better and smarter questions
• Establish a process for managing intellectual assets
• Obtain customer satisfaction information in near real-time
• Globalize knowledge management
30. What other managers are involved with knowledge management?
Ideally, all of them! Responsibilities of specific managers listed include:
• CEO: championing a KM effort, finding a CKO, providing resources, gaining organizational support for KM and preparing the organization for the cultural changes KM will bring
• CFO: ensuring financial resources
• COO: ensure that people embed KM practices into their work
• CIO: providing IT resources, including new KMS and use of existing systems if suitable
• Managers in general: support the KM effort and provide access to sources of knowledge
31. Describe COP and relate them to knowledge management.
COP (Communities of Practice) are groups of people with common professional interests, independent of role, geography, or project affiliation. For example, quality assurance engineers might form a community of practice in a multinational manufacturing firm.
COPs are related to knowledge management in two main ways: first, they are the place where knowledge in the area of interest resides, and second, they are where organizational culture shift must happen when KMS are deployed. They have other, relatively less central, connections as well.
32. What is the importance of COP in organizations?
Communities of practice add value to an organization in (at least) six ways:
• Creation of higher-quality knowledge
• Fewer surprises and plan revisions
• Greater capacity to deal with unstructured problems
• More effective knowledge sharing among business and corporate staff units
• Improved likelihood of implementing joint goals
• More efficient individual development and learning
33. Describe the need for measuring the success of KMS.
KMS involves the use of corporate resources, additional work for employees, and a cultural shift that may be difficult for some. These must be justified. While an initial KMS can be justified on the basis of faith in the technology, interest on the part of a pilot group, and case studies documenting other firms’ successes, later projects will require a degree of success with early ones. This means that their success must be measured.
34. What are the issues in knowledge management valuation?
The fundamental issue in knowledge management valuation is whether knowledge should be valued as an asset, valued for what it would bring if sold, or knowledge management should be valued for its benefits. Each approach raises specific secondary issues.
35. List some financial (tangible) metrics of knowledge management.
The fundamental financial metric for KM valuation is the ROI of KM projects. Other possible financial metrics, not discussed in the text, are the increase in the value of knowledge based on either an asset approach or an if-sold approach.
36. List some intangible (nonfinancial) metrics of knowledge management.
These include (but are not necessarily limited to) the following:
• Customer goodwill
• External relationship capital
• Structural capital
• Human capital
• Social capital
• Environmental capital
37. List failure factors associated with knowledge management.
Reasons for failure mentioned in the text include an effort that relies mainly on technology, without addressing whether or not a proposed system meets organizational needs; lack of commitment; failure to consider cultural issues; and failure to provide incentives to use the system. Others are listed in cited references and in other sources.
38. List success factors associated with knowledge management.
Factors that contribute to KM project success include the following:
• A link to the firm’s economic value
• A technical and organizational infrastructure on which to build
• A knowledge structure that matches how the organization works and uses knowledge
• A knowledge-friendly culture that leads directly to user support
• A clear purpose and language, to encourage user buy-in
• A change in motivational practices, to create a culture of sharing
• Multiple channels for knowledge transfer—because individuals have different ways of working and expressing themselves
• A level of process orientation to make a knowledge management effort worthwhile
• Motivational methods to encourage users to contribute and use knowledge
• Senior management support
39. What are the potential drawbacks of KMS?
The major drawback cited in the subsection with the corresponding title is that knowledge, once embedded in a KMS, may be difficult to change as circumstances change. Following yesterday’s best practices may not lead to tomorrow’s success.
Other potential drawbacks, such as cost, need for possibly painful cultural change, and more, are mentioned throughout the chapter. Students may find them in other sources as well.
40. Describe expert location systems.
Expert location systems are systems for locating experts, to help employees find and connect with colleagues who have the expertise required to solve specific problems, wherever they are.
41. Why is the term knowledge so difficult to define?
There is a vast amount of literature about what knowledge and knowing means in epistemology, social sciences, philosophy, and psychology. Although business is more pragmatic, there is no uniform definition or consensus on what knowledge and knowledge management specifically mean. We suspect that there are so many definitions because each field approaches knowledge differently, and each has different sets of assumptions.
42. Describe and relate the different characteristics of knowledge to one another.
Unlike other assets, knowledge has:
• Extraordinary leverage and increasing returns. Knowledge is not subject to diminishing returns. When it is used, it is not consumed. Its consumers can add to it, thus increasing its value. It can improve.
• Fragmentation, leakage, and the need to refresh. As knowledge grows, it branches and fragments. Knowledge is dynamic; it is information in action. Thus, an organization must continually refresh its knowledge base to keep it as a source of competitive advantage.
• Uncertain value. It is difficult to estimate the impact of an investment in knowledge.
• Uncertain value sharing. Similarly, it is difficult to estimate the value of sharing the knowledge, or even who will benefit most.
43. Explain why it is important to capture and manage knowledge.
Knowledge can have incredible impact on an organization when it is captured, managed, and most importantly reused. The leveraging of knowledge is clear from the opening vignette. An investment of less than $8 million in KM contributed, presumably significantly, to a sales increase of $122 million during two years. While we don’t have figures tying the revenue increase to a profit increase, the positive impact of these incremental sales on the bottom line is almost surely over $8 million.
44. Explain why organizational culture must sometimes change before knowledge management is introduced.
If there is no culture of sharing, it must be developed or any KM effort is doomed to failure.
45. How does knowledge management attain its primary objective?
The objective of KM is to identify knowledge, explicate it so it can be shared, and leverage its value through reuse. KM attains its objectives by providing a means to capture knowledge and then make it available throughout an organization.
46. How can employees be motivated to contribute to and use KMS?
Real reward systems and recognition seem to work best. People really like recognition (putting their names at the bottom as contributors). It can help if raises and promotions are tied to knowledge contribution and use.
47. What is the role of a knowledge repository in knowledge management?
The knowledge repository is the storage mechanism for the knowledge. It is like a database in function, but is not a database as the term database is usually understood.
48. Explain the importance of communication and collaboration technologies to the processes of knowledge management.
Without communication, there is no mechanism to share knowledge. Collaboration, a fancy word for people working together, is at the heart of any type of sharing—including knowledge.
49. Explain why firms adopt knowledge management initiatives.
The top five reasons that firms initiate knowledge management systems are:
• Faster response time to key issues (it takes less time to figure out what to do)
• Better decision making (because of more knowledge of how to make them)
• Reduced costs (because of better decisions)
• Improved productivity (ditto)
• Shared best practice (which can be considered to lead to the above)
50. Explain how the wrong organizational culture can reduce the effectiveness of knowledge management.
If people are not motivated to share their knowledge, or departments take the stance that something they didn’t invent is no good, etc., then the KM effort will limp along or fail.
51. Explain the role of the CKO in developing a KMS. What major responsibilities does he or she have?
The CKO is ultimately responsible for a KMS “from cradle to grave” for the entire knowledge management project while under development, and then for the management of the system and the knowledge once it is deployed. He or she:
• Heads up knowledge management efforts
• Is responsible for defining the area(s) of knowledge within the firm that will be the focal point(s), based upon the firm’s mission and objectives.
• Is responsible for standardizing the enterprise-wide vocabulary and for controlling the knowledge directory.
• Must get a handle on the company's repositories of research, resources, and expertise, including where they are stored and who manages and accesses them.
• Must encourage pollination among disparate workgroups with complementary resources.
• Is responsible for creating an infrastructure and cultural environment for knowledge sharing.
• Must assign or identify knowledge champions within business units to manage content their group produces, adding to the knowledge base and encouraging their colleagues to.
52. What is meant by a culture of knowledge sharing?
One in which the informal norm is to contribute knowledge into a system to and use it (not just pay lip service to it). It involves support at the highest level in an organization, and establishment of easy-to-use methods to capture and use the knowledge.
53. Why is it so difficult to evaluate the impacts of knowledge management?
Because many of its benefits are intangible, or are seen only in combination with the results of other factors. For example, the outcome a decision that was made with the assistance of a KMS usually cannot be compared with the outcome of the decision that would have been made without the KMS, even if it is possible to figure out what that decision might have been.
54. Explain how the Internet and related technologies (e.g., Web browsers, intranets) enable knowledge management.
In (at least) two ways:
• The Internet provides the communications infrastructure that makes it possible for employees throughout the company to participate in knowledge sharing.
• The KMS is structured as a Web site, which gives users the advantages of a familiar, easy-to-use interface as noted in other contexts several times earlier in this book.
55. List three top technologies most frequently used for implementing KMS and explain their importance.
The three top technologies most frequently used for implementing KMS are communication technologies, collaboration technologies, and storage/retrieval technologies. Without all of these, the objectives of knowledge management cannot be achieved.
Knowledge management (KM) is the systematic and active management of ideas, information, and knowledge residing in an organization’s employees.
Its purposes include effective and efficient problem solving, dynamic learning, strategic planning, and decision making. KM initiatives focus on identifying knowledge, explicating it in such a way that it can be shared in a formal manner, and leveraging its value through reuse.
2. Distinguish between knowledge and data.
Knowledge and data are related through information, which is also defined in this answer.
Data are facts, measurements, and statistics.
Information is organized or processed data that is timely (i.e., inferences from the data are drawn within the time frame of applicability) and accurate (i.e., with regard to the original data).
Knowledge is information that is contextual, relevant, and actionable.
(The conventional definition of actionable is “giving reason for legal action, such as slander.” If you accept that meaning for the term, you may prefer an alternative phrase here. However, since no single English word means “providing a practical basis for management action,” the term actionable is increasingly used in that sense today even though some still consider it incorrect.)
3. Describe the knowledge-based economy.
A knowledge-based economy is one in which the primary resource used to produce economic benefits is knowledge—as distinct from land, capital, energy or any other resource. One difference between knowledge and these other resources is that knowledge can be shared without diminishing, and can actually increase as a result of such sharing. Knowledge is also easier to transfer than are other resources, making laws and barriers difficult to apply and reducing the effect of location. Also, knowledge can have widely different values to different people, or even to the same person at different times.
(The term “knowledge-based economy” was first popularized, if not invented, by Peter Drucker as the title of Chapter 12 in The Age of Discontinuity (1969). Business students should recognize Drucker as one of the great management thinkers of the 20th century.)
4. Define tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge is knowledge that has been or can be articulated, codified, and stored. It deals with objective, rational and technical information in manuals, documents, procedures, software, and even stories (though this last is less common in business).
Tacit knowledge has been described as “know-how,” as opposed to the “know-what” and “know-why” of explicit knowledge. It is often highly personal and difficult to formalize, and deals with subjective, cognitive and experiential learning. Some tacit knowledge could be made explicit if the person holding the knowledge recognized the value of doing so, but in other cases it is difficult to codify (such as knowing how to ride a bicycle). Capturing and sharing tacit knowledge is a more difficult knowledge management task than is capturing and sharing explicit knowledge.
5. Define KMS and describe the capabilities of KMS.
The term KMS, or knowledge management system(s), refers to the use of modern information technology to systematize, enhance and expedite knowledge management inside and outside a firm.
KMS capabilities include capturing knowledge, storing it, allowing users to search the system for relevant knowledge, and making knowledge available to them. Some KMS use specific technologies for these purposes and some add additional features (e.g., the ability to contact a person who stored certain knowledge in the system with a question about it) but those are the basic conceptual elements.
6. Define learning organization and identify the characteristics of learning organizations.
A learning organization is one that is able to learn from its past experience. A learning organization performs these five activities well: solving problems systematically, experimenting creatively, learning from past experience, learning from the best practices of others, and transferring knowledge quickly and efficiently throughout the organization.
7. Define organizational memory.
Organizational memory is the way an organization brings knowledge from the past to bear on its present activities. This requires a way to save, represent and share knowledge, often but not necessarily a KMS.
8. Describe organizational learning.
“The development of new knowledge and insights that have the potential to influence an organization’s behavior.”
9. Define organizational culture and relate it to knowledge management.
Several definitions are possible:
“A pattern of shared basic assumptions [based on] learning over time what works and what doesn’t work, which become second nature.”(edited for continuity of excerpts)
“The specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization … From organizational values develop organizational norms, guidelines or expectations that prescribe appropriate kinds of behavior by employees in particular situations and control the behavior of organizational members towards one another.” (Hill, C. W. L., and G. R. Jones, Strategic Management (5e), Houghton Mifflin, 2001)
Culture is related to knowledge management because knowledge management, to be successful, must be accepted by members of an organization. Their willingness to do this, the causes of possible resistance, and the methods by which they can be motivated to overcome resistance all depend on the organization’s culture. This is true to some degree of any change, but especially of an effort to introduce something like knowledge management that has little obvious near-term benefit but has all the drawbacks.
10. Why do companies need knowledge management initiatives?
For two basic reasons: knowledge management is beneficial, and it won’t happen by itself.
Knowledge management is more beneficial today than in the past because of increasingly intense competition, the global marketplace, and (in part due to these two) increased personal job mobility.
11. Describe the process of knowledge creation.
Knowledge creation is the generation of new insights, ideas, or routines. It is an interplay between tacit and explicit knowledge, a growing spiral as knowledge moves among the individual, group, and organizational levels. There are four modes of knowledge creation:
• Socialization: converting tacit knowledge to new tacit knowledge through social interactions and shared experience among organization members.
• Combination: creating new explicit knowledge by merging, categorizing, reclassifying, and synthesizing existing explicit knowledge.
• Externalization: converting tacit knowledge to new explicit knowledge.
• Internalization: creating new tacit knowledge from explicit knowledge.
12. What are the characteristics of knowledge sharing?
• It takes place when there is trust, interest, and shared language.
• It requires access to knowledgeable members of the organization.
• It requires a culture “marked by autonomy, redundancy, requisite variety, intention, and fluctuation.”
13. Define knowledge seeking (or sourcing).
“The search for, and use of, internal organizational knowledge.”
14. Define the process approach to knowledge management.
The process approach attempts to codify organizational knowledge through formalized controls, processes, and technologies. It frequently uses IT in forms such as intranets and data warehousing.
(Note that this question opens with “Define,” while the next one opens with “Describe.” This can be taken as an effort to vary the phrasing or as a deliberate request for different types of answers. The answers presented here are both brief descriptions. If you have more specific requirements, it might be well to make them explicit.)
15. Describe the practice approach to knowledge management.
The practice approach to knowledge management assumes that the vast majority of organizational knowledge is tacit and that formal controls and processes are not effective in their transfer. The focus of this approach is to build communities of practice.
16. Why is a hybrid approach to KM desirable?
Because both the practice approach and the process approach have drawbacks. By using each where it is most appropriate, typically evolving from a practice approach to a process approach, the advantages of both can be obtained while minimizing the impact of their drawbacks.
17. Describe best practices as they relate to knowledge management.
There are two possible, and very different, interpretations of this question: (a) What are best practices in knowledge management? and (b) How can KM help an organization disseminate and implement best practices as they relate to its operations? If you have one of these in mind, you may want to make your requirements known to students.
Much of the chapter, both what has gone before and what is to come, addresses the first interpretation of this question. The current section’s “Best Practices” subsection addresses the second. It points out that early knowledge repositories listed best practices and made them available within a firm, and that on-line, Web-accessible repositories can have a wide-ranging impact on the use of knowledge throughout it. It further categorizes the best practices that can be put into a repository into four levels, from lowest to highest:
1. A good idea that is not yet proven but makes intuitive sense.
2. A good practice that has improved business results.
3. A local best practice for all or part of the organization based on hard data.
4. An industry best practice, similar to the third level but using hard data from industry.
18. Define knowledge repository and describe how to create a knowledge repository.
A knowledge repository is a database in an informal sense, though not in the formal sense of database management systems. It is an electronic storehouse of knowledge which is often text based and may have widely varying characteristics. Its structure will depend on its purpose, the type(s) of knowledge it stores, and the way that knowledge is represented.
There are three ways to create a knowledge repository: to develop a custom Internet-based system, to purchase a document management system, or to purchase a knowledge management package. Whichever of these is chosen, it is important to make contributing knowledge easy for the contributor and to have a good way to catalogue the knowledge it will contain.
19. Describe the KMS cycle.
The KMS cycle has the steps listed below.
1. Create knowledge.
2. Capture knowledge.
3. Refine knowledge.
4. Store knowledge.
5. Manage knowledge.
6. Disseminate knowledge.
20. List and describe the components of KMS.
Components of KMS include communication, collaboration, and storage and retrieval.
21. Describe how AI and intelligent agents support knowledge management.
Artificial intelligence supports knowledge management by doing the following:
• Assist in and enhance searching knowledge (e.g., intelligent agents in Web searches)
• Help establish knowledge profiles of individuals and groups
• Help determine the relative importance of knowledge when it is contributed to and accessed from the knowledge repository
• Scan e-mail, documents, and databases to perform knowledge discovery, determine meaningful relationships, glean knowledge, or induce rules for expert systems
• Identify patterns in data (usually through neural networks)
• Forecast future results by using existing knowledge
• Provide advice directly from knowledge by using neural networks or expert systems
• Provide a natural language or voice command–driven user interface for a KMS
Intelligent agents support knowledge management by learning what the user prefers to see and how the user organizes it. Then, the intelligent agent takes over to provide that information at the desktop, just as a good administrative assistant would.
22. Relate XML to knowledge management and to knowledge portals.
One of the challenges in knowledge management is selecting a good, common representation of knowledge embedded in documents. Extensible Markup Language (XML) assists in meeting this challenge by enabling standardized representations of data structures, so that data can be processed appropriately by heterogeneous systems without case-by-case programming. Thus, XML-based messages can be taken from back-end repositories and fed out through the portal interface. Wide adoption of XML can help solve the problem of integrating data from disparate sources. Due to its potential to simplify systems integration, XML may become the universal language of all portal vendors.
23. Define knowware.
Technology tools (for all practical purposes, software) to support knowledge management. (The term was coined by analogy to hardware, software, middleware, etc. While it was by no means invented for this book, it has yet to gain widespread use. A Google search for knowware in Dec. 2006 got 83,300 hits, compared with over 14 million for middleware and nearly 40 million for firmware.)
24. Describe the major categories of knowledge management tools.
The seven major categories of knowledge management tools are:
• Collaborative computing tools, for transferring knowledge within an organization
• Knowledge servers, for storing and providing access to a knowledge repository
• Enterprise knowledge portals: see answer to Question 3 below
• Electronic document management: see answer to Question 4 below
• Knowledge harvesting tools: see answer to Question 5 below
• Search engines, for finding knowledge in a repository
• Knowledge management suites: see answer to Question 6 below
25. Define EKP.
An Enterprise Knowledge Portal. EKPs provide convenient access to an organization’s body of stored knowledge, while a server handles document and knowledge management parts of a KMS.
26. Define EDM and relate it to knowledge management and to CMS.
Electronic Document Management. Since much knowledge is stored in the form of unstructured documents of various types, and EDM is designed to manage such documents, they are a natural fit.
EDM systems are related to Content Management Systems (CMS) because CMS is simply a new approach to EDM that includes features for versioning (keeping track of various versions of a document) and to reflect business rules in document management activities.
27. Describe tools for knowledge harvesting.
Knowledge harvesting is the process of capturing knowledge from users with minimal involvement or activity on their part. Such tools analyze documents of specific types, such as e-mail or word processing, for content that indicates knowledge. They then use this information either to store the document as knowledge or to categorize the document’s originator as a source of knowledge.
28. List the major systems that are frequently integrated with KMS.
KMS integrate communications, collaboration, and storage systems.
29. Describe the role of the CKO.
The Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) is responsible for all knowledge management-related activities that go on in an organization. (See the “Teaching Tips” section of this manual for more on the use of this title.) Specifically, a CKO should:
• Set knowledge management strategic priorities
• Establish a knowledge repository of best practices
• Gain a commitment from senior executives to support a learning environment
• Teach information seekers how to ask better and smarter questions
• Establish a process for managing intellectual assets
• Obtain customer satisfaction information in near real-time
• Globalize knowledge management
30. What other managers are involved with knowledge management?
Ideally, all of them! Responsibilities of specific managers listed include:
• CEO: championing a KM effort, finding a CKO, providing resources, gaining organizational support for KM and preparing the organization for the cultural changes KM will bring
• CFO: ensuring financial resources
• COO: ensure that people embed KM practices into their work
• CIO: providing IT resources, including new KMS and use of existing systems if suitable
• Managers in general: support the KM effort and provide access to sources of knowledge
31. Describe COP and relate them to knowledge management.
COP (Communities of Practice) are groups of people with common professional interests, independent of role, geography, or project affiliation. For example, quality assurance engineers might form a community of practice in a multinational manufacturing firm.
COPs are related to knowledge management in two main ways: first, they are the place where knowledge in the area of interest resides, and second, they are where organizational culture shift must happen when KMS are deployed. They have other, relatively less central, connections as well.
32. What is the importance of COP in organizations?
Communities of practice add value to an organization in (at least) six ways:
• Creation of higher-quality knowledge
• Fewer surprises and plan revisions
• Greater capacity to deal with unstructured problems
• More effective knowledge sharing among business and corporate staff units
• Improved likelihood of implementing joint goals
• More efficient individual development and learning
33. Describe the need for measuring the success of KMS.
KMS involves the use of corporate resources, additional work for employees, and a cultural shift that may be difficult for some. These must be justified. While an initial KMS can be justified on the basis of faith in the technology, interest on the part of a pilot group, and case studies documenting other firms’ successes, later projects will require a degree of success with early ones. This means that their success must be measured.
34. What are the issues in knowledge management valuation?
The fundamental issue in knowledge management valuation is whether knowledge should be valued as an asset, valued for what it would bring if sold, or knowledge management should be valued for its benefits. Each approach raises specific secondary issues.
35. List some financial (tangible) metrics of knowledge management.
The fundamental financial metric for KM valuation is the ROI of KM projects. Other possible financial metrics, not discussed in the text, are the increase in the value of knowledge based on either an asset approach or an if-sold approach.
36. List some intangible (nonfinancial) metrics of knowledge management.
These include (but are not necessarily limited to) the following:
• Customer goodwill
• External relationship capital
• Structural capital
• Human capital
• Social capital
• Environmental capital
37. List failure factors associated with knowledge management.
Reasons for failure mentioned in the text include an effort that relies mainly on technology, without addressing whether or not a proposed system meets organizational needs; lack of commitment; failure to consider cultural issues; and failure to provide incentives to use the system. Others are listed in cited references and in other sources.
38. List success factors associated with knowledge management.
Factors that contribute to KM project success include the following:
• A link to the firm’s economic value
• A technical and organizational infrastructure on which to build
• A knowledge structure that matches how the organization works and uses knowledge
• A knowledge-friendly culture that leads directly to user support
• A clear purpose and language, to encourage user buy-in
• A change in motivational practices, to create a culture of sharing
• Multiple channels for knowledge transfer—because individuals have different ways of working and expressing themselves
• A level of process orientation to make a knowledge management effort worthwhile
• Motivational methods to encourage users to contribute and use knowledge
• Senior management support
39. What are the potential drawbacks of KMS?
The major drawback cited in the subsection with the corresponding title is that knowledge, once embedded in a KMS, may be difficult to change as circumstances change. Following yesterday’s best practices may not lead to tomorrow’s success.
Other potential drawbacks, such as cost, need for possibly painful cultural change, and more, are mentioned throughout the chapter. Students may find them in other sources as well.
40. Describe expert location systems.
Expert location systems are systems for locating experts, to help employees find and connect with colleagues who have the expertise required to solve specific problems, wherever they are.
41. Why is the term knowledge so difficult to define?
There is a vast amount of literature about what knowledge and knowing means in epistemology, social sciences, philosophy, and psychology. Although business is more pragmatic, there is no uniform definition or consensus on what knowledge and knowledge management specifically mean. We suspect that there are so many definitions because each field approaches knowledge differently, and each has different sets of assumptions.
42. Describe and relate the different characteristics of knowledge to one another.
Unlike other assets, knowledge has:
• Extraordinary leverage and increasing returns. Knowledge is not subject to diminishing returns. When it is used, it is not consumed. Its consumers can add to it, thus increasing its value. It can improve.
• Fragmentation, leakage, and the need to refresh. As knowledge grows, it branches and fragments. Knowledge is dynamic; it is information in action. Thus, an organization must continually refresh its knowledge base to keep it as a source of competitive advantage.
• Uncertain value. It is difficult to estimate the impact of an investment in knowledge.
• Uncertain value sharing. Similarly, it is difficult to estimate the value of sharing the knowledge, or even who will benefit most.
43. Explain why it is important to capture and manage knowledge.
Knowledge can have incredible impact on an organization when it is captured, managed, and most importantly reused. The leveraging of knowledge is clear from the opening vignette. An investment of less than $8 million in KM contributed, presumably significantly, to a sales increase of $122 million during two years. While we don’t have figures tying the revenue increase to a profit increase, the positive impact of these incremental sales on the bottom line is almost surely over $8 million.
44. Explain why organizational culture must sometimes change before knowledge management is introduced.
If there is no culture of sharing, it must be developed or any KM effort is doomed to failure.
45. How does knowledge management attain its primary objective?
The objective of KM is to identify knowledge, explicate it so it can be shared, and leverage its value through reuse. KM attains its objectives by providing a means to capture knowledge and then make it available throughout an organization.
46. How can employees be motivated to contribute to and use KMS?
Real reward systems and recognition seem to work best. People really like recognition (putting their names at the bottom as contributors). It can help if raises and promotions are tied to knowledge contribution and use.
47. What is the role of a knowledge repository in knowledge management?
The knowledge repository is the storage mechanism for the knowledge. It is like a database in function, but is not a database as the term database is usually understood.
48. Explain the importance of communication and collaboration technologies to the processes of knowledge management.
Without communication, there is no mechanism to share knowledge. Collaboration, a fancy word for people working together, is at the heart of any type of sharing—including knowledge.
49. Explain why firms adopt knowledge management initiatives.
The top five reasons that firms initiate knowledge management systems are:
• Faster response time to key issues (it takes less time to figure out what to do)
• Better decision making (because of more knowledge of how to make them)
• Reduced costs (because of better decisions)
• Improved productivity (ditto)
• Shared best practice (which can be considered to lead to the above)
50. Explain how the wrong organizational culture can reduce the effectiveness of knowledge management.
If people are not motivated to share their knowledge, or departments take the stance that something they didn’t invent is no good, etc., then the KM effort will limp along or fail.
51. Explain the role of the CKO in developing a KMS. What major responsibilities does he or she have?
The CKO is ultimately responsible for a KMS “from cradle to grave” for the entire knowledge management project while under development, and then for the management of the system and the knowledge once it is deployed. He or she:
• Heads up knowledge management efforts
• Is responsible for defining the area(s) of knowledge within the firm that will be the focal point(s), based upon the firm’s mission and objectives.
• Is responsible for standardizing the enterprise-wide vocabulary and for controlling the knowledge directory.
• Must get a handle on the company's repositories of research, resources, and expertise, including where they are stored and who manages and accesses them.
• Must encourage pollination among disparate workgroups with complementary resources.
• Is responsible for creating an infrastructure and cultural environment for knowledge sharing.
• Must assign or identify knowledge champions within business units to manage content their group produces, adding to the knowledge base and encouraging their colleagues to.
52. What is meant by a culture of knowledge sharing?
One in which the informal norm is to contribute knowledge into a system to and use it (not just pay lip service to it). It involves support at the highest level in an organization, and establishment of easy-to-use methods to capture and use the knowledge.
53. Why is it so difficult to evaluate the impacts of knowledge management?
Because many of its benefits are intangible, or are seen only in combination with the results of other factors. For example, the outcome a decision that was made with the assistance of a KMS usually cannot be compared with the outcome of the decision that would have been made without the KMS, even if it is possible to figure out what that decision might have been.
54. Explain how the Internet and related technologies (e.g., Web browsers, intranets) enable knowledge management.
In (at least) two ways:
• The Internet provides the communications infrastructure that makes it possible for employees throughout the company to participate in knowledge sharing.
• The KMS is structured as a Web site, which gives users the advantages of a familiar, easy-to-use interface as noted in other contexts several times earlier in this book.
55. List three top technologies most frequently used for implementing KMS and explain their importance.
The three top technologies most frequently used for implementing KMS are communication technologies, collaboration technologies, and storage/retrieval technologies. Without all of these, the objectives of knowledge management cannot be achieved.
