Knowledge Management is meanwhile generally recognized as a discipline established in many organisations and no longer needs a special justification. It is certainly not unrestrictedly positively seen and even some of its supporters saw a hype in the development of the last few years, which is fading and is being replaced by a realist view of what is feasible. In the attempt to gain a proof of success, one bumps into further difficulties since the effects of KM activities are often not easily or explicitly measurable. It is not clear if this would not have developed as positively when not measures would have been taken for the development of knowledge management. The goal of this paper is the attempt of a comprehensive explanation of a new theme which is incorporated in Tacit Knowledge Management (TKM), as well as a proposal for the integration of TKM in the traditional understanding of knowledge management.
In today’s digital economy, knowledge manegment is critical to the success of many organizations. This paper is based on a research which examined the practices of knowledge management in Turkish large companies. The research sample was 214 Turkish organizations. Data were obtained by questionnaires and analyzed by SPSS. The main findings revealed that the majority of respondents believed that their knowledge management system was very important to the development of their organizations, and that the most important sources of ideas come from customers. The most important method used by Turkish organizations to facilitate the sharing of knowledge between employees was internet. This research produces some useful insights and leaving a number of issues for future research.
The GPO-WM-Method combines the template-based GPO-WM-Process Analysis with the GPO-WM-Solution Base to support process teams with the integration of knowledge management activities into daily business processes. The template-based, participative approach is easy to learn, fosters awareness about the handling of knowledge, identifies strengths, weaknesses and needs for action and uses improvement ideas made by the process owner and employees for the joint work out of solutions. The GPO-WM-Solution Database with around 100 KM methods and tools supports the search for solutions. Design principles are supporting the implementation and integration of KM into the business process.
This paper presents results of an empirical study on the use of knowledge management in logistics companies from Germany and Portugal. This study run in early 2006 aimed at understanding how important knowledge in those companies is, what and how strong the investments in knowledge were in 2004, what needs (defined as the difference between priorities and investments) did exist, and what the impacts of the investments in knowledge on the companies’ evolution between 2003 and 2005 were. The results achieved so far show clear differences, but also surprising similarities between the two countries. Furthermore, the impact of KM on the logistics performance is still hardly to be grasped.
Several of the Communities of Practices (CoP) Alterra/Wing manages have reached their mid-life. Designed CoPs have come to life and have achieved alignment, from which we can learn. A growing interest can be signalised in using CoPs as management instruments and in governance. Governments are seeking new ways in policy making and new steering instruments. Using the case of agrologistics we describe how the Dutch government has used a CoP for complex planning and organizational problems. The social design, planning and management of a new CoP have linked together a wide range of stakeholders to establish a operational CoP. Alignment is a key factor in this transition to self-steering; the value of belonging is very powerful. Masters play an important role in setting up and in steering the CoP. CoPs can be developed as new instruments of governance, based on the theoretical concept of CoP.
In recent years the possibility of applying knowledge management to logistics and to logistics planning has been put forward in literature. Despite of these discussions knowledge management has not been implemented in logistics in large scale. To draw a clear picture of the current state-of-implementation and understand the impact knowledge management activities have on a company’s logistics performance a comparative study is run with German and Portuguese logistics companies. The paper explains the theoretical background and practical implementation of this study and discusses a strategy to measure the investments in KM, access the needs of KM, and evaluate the impact of KM investments in the logistics sector. Although the study is still in progress, results are expected to be available for presentation at the conference.
This paper surveys knowledge management (KM) development using a literature review and classification of articles from 1995 to 2004 with a keyword index and article abstract in order to explore how KM performance evaluation has developed during this period. Based on the scope of 76 articles from 78 academic journals of KM, this paper surveys and classifies KM measurements using the following eight categories: qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, financial indicator analysis, non-financial indicator analysis, internal performance analysis, external performance analysis, project-oriented analysis, and organizational-oriented analysis together with their measurement matrices for different research and problem domains. Discussion is presented, indicating the followings future development directions for KM performance evaluation: (1) KM performance evaluation is getting more important. (2) The quantitative analysis is the primary methodology in KM performance evaluation. (3) Firms are now highlighting the KM performance of competitors, through benchmarking or best practices, rather than internally auditing KM performance via balanced scorecard. (4) Firms may begin to focus more on project management measurement, than on the entire organization.
Measuring knowledge related performance in organizations usually is conceptualized on the basis of a strategic resp. top down-approach of KM measurement. Unfortunately, such a strategic approach has some important disadvantages: (1) It is difficult to get commitment from senior managers regarding the investment into strategic KM projects; (2) Due to the complexity of the organizational system it is difficult to show the impact of KM on organizational performance; (3) Operational KM projects often are out of focus for top managers since decentralized activities seem not to have the potential to convince senior managers of the impact of KM on organizational performance. In this paper it is shown how the actual weaknesses of measuring knowledge related performance can be overcome by a knowledge related measurement- and monitoring-system. This will be made clear on a conceptual level as well as on the basis of a case study.
The paper discusses the integration of codified and tacit knowledge as a potential source of competitive advantage. The management of explicit knowledge is viewed through knowledge management practices, whereas the management of tacit knowledge is conceptualised through strategic human resource management. The paper presents the empirical results of testing of low- and high-synergy models of knowledge integration on a representative sample of large Croatian enterprises.
Hewlett Packard services consulting and integration (HPS C&I) has had worldwide Knowledge Management programs for over 6 years, but until recently they had not developed a consistent set of monthly KM measures. In late 2003, HPS C&I established a set of 6 worldwide measures, which are described in this presentation. We also discovered that there was value in having uniform worldwide measures, but we could not establish uniform worldwide goals. The reason for this had to do with wide variability in business maturity and English language capability within our workforce. Consequently, we assigned each country into one of four “bands” and set different goals for each band. The presentation provides details on this aspect of our measurement program. Actual performance is not presented, because it is deemed company confidential.
Knowledge audit lays a concrete foundation for any knowledge management programs. The central topic of this paper is to integrate various knowledge audit related techniques into pre-audit preparation, in-audit process and post-audit analysis in a systematic manner. Culture assessment, in the form of surveys and radar charts, along with orientation program make up the pre-audit preparation. Structured interviews are carried out to capture process-critical knowledge. Knowledge inventory, knowledge maps and knowledge flow analysis compose of post-audit analysis. Knowledge inventory is then built for stocktaking knowledge assets and thus revealing the key knowledge assets by measuring them against four performance criteria. Knowledge mapping together with social network analysis are to show the knowledge exchange path and make the key knowledge suppliers and customers visible. They are then being further applied into knowledge flow analysis, which serves to reveal the strength and weakness of the current knowledge flow. A case study of applying the designed instruments in the Engineering Division of the Hong Kong Dragon Airlines Limited and the related analysis are also present in this paper.
In the paper the applications to the 2002 Knowledge Management Award are discussed in relation to measuring the benefits of KM. It is concluded that benefits of KM initiatives depend on the KM approach taken.
The objective of this paper is to describe a new post-Nonaka generation of Knowledge Management that, for the first time has the potential to meet people’s expectations. It is divided into the three categories:
• processes
• organisation & culture
• information technology
and builds on Frederik Taylor’s idea of applying knowledge to work, though noton his Scientific Management model. Instead, it extends to Knowledge Workers and gives answers to the key question of Knowledge Management: How can the productivity of knowledge workers be increased?
The generation of technical knowledge abounds while the underusage of existing knowledge potential remains a problem in business as well as in society. Generally speaking value can be extracted from knowledge in three ways:
- by exclusive use
- by faster access
- by better translation of public knowledge into products that yield private profit
Each way requires different approaches to KM. But in all cases the problem of how to deal with abundance arises: It arises at the individual as well as at the level of interface design in a knowledge dividing society.
First ideas to solve that problem refer to the individual rather than the interface design level:
- technical solutions
- psychological solutions
- neurological solutions
deal with the growing gap between abundant potential knowledge and scarce human attention on the one hand and with restricted human capacity to process information on the other.
For the time being a clear focus on good old virtues, such as will (focus), modesty (less is more) and courage (to decide under conditions of incomplete information and uncertainty) seem as trivial intellectually as hard to implement in practice.