In simple terms, knowledge management is the answer to the following question: “what do we need to know better in order to work smarter?”.

In more formal terms, by knowledge management I mean integrated processes and technologies to help individuals and teams apply knowledge to improve business performance.

The emphasis is not on technology alone: the emphasis is on people, processes, and concrete and measurable business results of a knowledge management project.

Let me expand on how to measure the results of a knowledge management project.

Few knowledge management projects include some measure of results at all. The few that do often use self-referential metrics, i.e., they measure the knowledge management process instead of its outcome. Some examples? Number of users, number of searches per person per day, number of new documents added to the knowledge base each month, etc.

Put yourself in a CEO’s shoes: your company has just bought an expensive knowledge management solution. Would you be satisfied if they told you that the result is, your employees make extensive usage of the solution to add to and search for information? Probably not: you still would not understand what you got for the money you spent.

You’d be much more satisfied if they told you that – thanks to easier access to manuals, FAQs, contracts, and best practices – your call center reps take 20% less time to answer customers’ queries, have slashed escalations to second-level experts by half, and need fewer training sessions per quarter, while customer sat inched up by 5% after the KM solution was put in place.

So my approach to knowledge management is more focussed on business performance indicators and on the people who make business succeed – and is less obsessed with technology.

I have therefore developed a knowledge management methodology that takes these crucial factors into account, including best practices for successful knowledge management projects, based on my practical experiences on why some projects succeed and others fail.

Coming back to technologies, though: enabling technologies that can be used in knowledge management projects are now plentiful, feature-rich and reliable. My point of view is, they come in three sorts:

1. technologies to directly organise and manage explicit knowledge, and to control the processes that feed it; this category includes content and document management platforms (Documentum, Hummingbird DM, Filenet, Vignette, Interwoven, Websphere, …), and e-learning authoring and delivery platforms (Docent, Saba, …)

2. technologies to find explicit knowledge scattered across many different existing sources (file systems, document management systems, e-mail, web, intranet, databases, …); this category includes information retrieval platforms (Autonomy, Convey, Verity, Hummingbird KM, …), applied to non-structured information, and business intelligence platforms (SAS, BusinessObjects, Microstrategy, Hummingbird BI, Board, …) applied to structured information

3. technologies to facilitate access to tacit knowledge, i.e. to find experts and work with them; this category includes communication and collaboration platforms (Documentum eRoom, Opentext, Hummingbird Collaboration, Agilience, Centra, Notes, SharePoint, Exchange, …) and user profiling (e.g., Convey)

If you wish to know more about these subjects, please contact me at giaforni@tin.it