Knowledge Management

A Guide To Planning A Knowledge Management System By: Floyd W. Carlson University of Maryland Bowie State University 14 March 1999

Abstract Corporate knowledge normally belongs to the individual and not the company. When an employee leaves the organization, their knowledge of the business process and expertise leave too. The personnel who stay with the firm primarily only share their ideas and experience with those they work with on a daily basis. These individuals contain the knowledge regarding everything from the organization’s best practices, business processes, patents, completed projects, email messages and those ideas contained in their own head. This knowledge is both tacit and explicit. Explicit knowledge comes in the form of books, documents, white papers, policy manuals and databases. Tactic knowledge is normally hard to code and can be found in the minds of employees, experience of customers and memories of past vendors. Capturing this knowledge is critical to a firm’s success with respect to being an agile company in the fast changing market place. Companies who respond quickly to customers, can create new markets, rapidly develop new products and dominate emergent technology will succeed. If this information is not captured and shared, vast amounts of productivity will be lost recreating the wheel when personnel change or new projects are initiated. This research focuses on how a firm can implement a knowledge management strategy to counter the loss of an individual’s knowledge when they leave and other barriers preventing knowledge sharing. Supporting information was collected from books, magazine articles, Internet sites and my own experience. The results of this research can provide management with a guide to planning their knowledge management program.

Table of Contents Thesis Statement What is Knowledge Management? Why Have Knowledge Management Strategies? Is Knowledge Management a Fad? Barriers to Knowledge Sharing Steps to Having a Successful Knowledge Management Program Project Management Information Needs Determine a Strategy Selecting a Value Proposition to Focus the Knowledge Program Knowledge Management’s Supporting Enablers Culture Technology Infrastructure Measure The Knowledge Management Process Brining the Knowledge Management System Together Conclusion Bibliography

Thesis Statement The majority of the knowledge within a firm belongs to the individual employees and is seldom shared throughout the organization, except within the individual’s own work group. The author believes understanding the barriers to knowledge sharing and how to overcome them, along with how to plan, capture, share and distribute the knowledge within an organization, will help management to reduce the impact caused by employee turnover and will provide the firm with a corporate memory for collaborating and sharing best practices and lessons learned. What is Knowledge Management? Knowledge management is a formal process of determining what information a company has that can benefit others in the organization and making the information easily available for use by those who need it. The process includes formal procedures to collect such information as lessons learned during a project’s execution and the best practices occurring throughout the organization, a well established infrastructure, networks for transferring knowledge between employees, and tools to facilitate the process. Once the process captures the organization’s knowledge, the real power occurs when the users utilizing the information use it by putting the shared into action. (17) Tacit & Explicit Knowledge Most literature on knowledge management concurs that knowledge within an organization falls into two categories. This includes both tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is easy to code and comes in the form of books, policy manuals, company documents, reports, software, mission statements, databases and etc. On the other hand, tacit knowledge is hard to code and extract. It is practical knowledge on how to get things done and personal knowledge based on individual experience and is normally shared through face to face contact with others. At first glance, it seems it would be difficult to capture tacit knowledge, but in order to have a successful knowledge management system process both tacit and explicit knowledge must be collected and shared. It is through the collaboration of individuals and teams that tacit knowledge begins to be shared and utilized by others. (2) To better understand tacit knowledge, Japanese organizational theorist Ikujiro Nonaka provides an example of how Matsushita Electric Company was able to capture tacit knowledge about bread making to improve their home bread-making machine. The company was having difficulties getting their bread machine to correctly knead the dough. Ikuko Tanaka, a software developer for the company, suggested she should train with the Osaka International Hotel’s head baker to learn his technique. The hotel was known for making the best bread in the city. She watched and learned his unique way of stretching the dough, which represents tacit knowledge. In this case, the baker’s method of bread making is highly personal, hard to formalize and difficult to communicate to others. Working with her firm’s project engineers, they were able to develop the product specifications based on her experience from observing the baker. The bread making

machine product specifications represent explicit knowledge, which can easily be shared and communicated. The bread machine was able to reproduce the baker’s method of stretching the dough, thus enabling it to make a quality loaf of bread. The refinements made to this machine made it very successful for the company and set sales records in its first year. This example also demonstrates a knowledge management process. The company started with an objective to make a better bread machine and the plan was to capture the baker’s tacit knowledge by observing and learning his technique. The tacit knowledge was transformed into explicit knowledge through developing the product’s specifications and shared with others in the company to create the product. (16) Data Versus Knowledge Knowledge is more than just data and information being made available to users on a database. Data is raw facts and figures, while information consist of patterns of data. Organizations have databases full of data and information, but until the people in the company use it, it is not knowledge. Author Karl Eric Sveiby highlights this by saying managers are investing billions of dollars in information technology and are receiving minimal results, because they are confused about the differences between knowledge and information. He continues by saying managers must realize knowledge is inside their people and knowledge creation is an interactive social process. It is critical that management understands that by just having data and information collected on a file server and sharing it, does not mean they have a knowledge management system. (12) Why Have Knowledge Management Strategies? This section provides the basic reasons why you would want to have a knowledge management system. It examines the impact caused by the ever-increasing employee turnover rates, missing an opportunity to repeat success by not capturing the firm’s past knowledge and not using the lesson learned from the past to prevent the same mistakes from occurring. Personnel Turnover Personnel turnover is compounded because corporate knowledge normally belongs to the individual and not the company. When an employee leaves the organization, their knowledge of the business process and expertise leave too. The experiences of the personnel who stay with the firm, primarily only share their ideas with those they work with on a daily basis. This limits the number of people who can actually benefit from their experience. When information about the business processes, best practices and lessons learned are not captured and shared, vast amounts of productivity are lost recreating the wheel when personnel change jobs. Employee turnover is an increasing problem and future predictions show this trend will continue. According to a poll conducted by Louis Harris & Associates in January 1998, 53% of U.S. workers plan to leave their current jobs voluntarily over the next five years. Their findings show some industries are having greater yearly turnover rates than others

are. For example, turnover rates for printing production workers is 16%, convenient-store employees 103%, trucking industry 10% and software companies 18.2% for technical professionals; 16.8% for technical managers. The impact caused by these high turnover rates is substantial. Leveraged Technology, a computer consulting firm in New York, had projected a 300% turnover rate for 1996. Their management stated that the normally excepted changeover rate for the help-desk industry is 50%. Sean Durham the firm’s president stated the high turnover was effecting their ability to generate revenue. They were receiving 60 to 80 new requisitions monthly, but we could only fill half of them. This cost them $9 million a year and does not account for the cost of the lost productivity involved in each new employee having to recreate the wheel. The purpose of these examples is to demonstrate the percentage of employees leaving their jobs and emphasizes that when they leave, so does their knowledge and experience. (4) (15) The U.S. Army provides another example of lost productivity resulting from high personnel turnover. Field grade officers normally change jobs every 12 to 18 months. Based on the author’s own personal experience, it takes up to six months to fully learn all the aspects of the job and how the business processes of the organization work. Seldom when you enter a new position is there any continuity material available to assist one in the learning process. In addition, most of the field grade positions all change at the same time leaving no peers with the institutional knowledge to assist in the transition. Every year this cycle repeats itself and leads to the reinventing of the wheel by numerous officers each time they change jobs. In this case, a basic knowledge management strategy of capturing just the organizations explicit knowledge would provide a great benefit to the incoming officer and reduce the lost productivity caused by the frequent changeovers. Repeat Past Success Having a knowledge management strategy allows the organization to be able to duplicate past successful projects again. Ford Motor Company provides an example where this was not the case. Their problem was a result of not having a process in place to capture the experience and lessons learned from on going projects. When Ford’s management wanted to know why their original Taurus design was so successful, no one in the company could provide the answer. There was no record and no one could remember what made the project a success. The bottom line was the knowledge gained from the Taurus project was lost forever and could not be repeated. (6) Learn From The Past A knowledge management strategy helps a company to learn from past experience and hopefully prevents repeated mistakes. Philosopher George Santayana once said, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". A study of 150 new products conducted in 1985 concluded knowledge collected from prior failures was most often the reason the new product was successful. For example, IBM modeled its successful 360computer line from the technology of their failed Stretch computer. Boeing created an employee group to develop a set of lessons learned about the differences between their successful 707 & 727 planes, as compared to their 737 & 747 planes, which had a

number of problems. The team created a book of recommendations, that the company used to make their 757 & 767 planes. The knowledge Boeing gained from past lessons learned resulted in their most successful and error free launch in their Boeing’s history. (10) The cost of losing knowledge can not be over emphasized. This next example demonstrates how it can have a major financial impact on a company. In 1994, institutional investors were not happy with the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency. The board of directors voted to remove Maurice Saatchi as the company’s CEO. Several executives and big client accounts also left with him. The lost accounts did not have a huge impact on the firm financially. The major cost to the company was their stock dropped immediately in half. The reason for the decrease was that investors realized the majority of the organization’s value was in Maurice Saatchi’s human capital. (20) Is Knowledge Management a Fad? Knowledge management is more than a fad or the newest management buzzword. The counter arguments suggest knowledge management is being hyped as a means for management consultants and information technology firms to increase profits. As with any project an organization plans to implement, it must be tied to the company’s business objective and be supported by upper management to succeed. If the firm believes an offthe-self knowledge software program can accomplish their business objective, then they should purchase the product. The author agrees with Yogesh Malhotra’s observations that off-the-self knowledge management solutions based on "rules and procedures embedded in technology – seem misaligned with the dynamically changing business environment" (p.2). A knowledge management strategy is much more than just capturing data in a database. Kaisa Kautto-Koivula, head of knowledge management development at Nokia, said their firm’s first attempts at knowledge management failed because they put more emphasis on the technology and less on the human aspects of the knowledge management process. West Churchman said, "to conceive of knowledge as a collection of information seems to rob the concept of all its life...Knowledge resides in the user and not the collection" (Ibid. p.4). His statement reinforces that a knowledge management strategy is more than using an off-the-shelf software package or technology to capture information. (13) (24) A lack of understanding of what knowledge management is or is not is feeding the argument that this is just another fad. An article in Software Magazine said knowledge means "understanding the relationships of data, identifying and documenting rules for managing data, and assuring that data are accurate and maintain integrity" (Malhotra, p.2). This could lead the reader to believe one’s current database of stored data just needs a few rules applied and now a knowledge management strategy exists. A complete opposite view feeding the misunderstanding of knowledge management is that technology can never really capture individual knowledge. Ian Angell, an information systems professor at London School of Economics, believes we can never automate real knowledge. Professor Angell argues knowledge and intelligence are personal to the

individual and you can never separate it from them. He says, "mega-millions of dollars have already been wasted in the ‘knowledge scam’, the futile quest to categories common sense knowledge.." (p.23). Each of these examples demonstrates complete polar views about knowledge management. Knowledge management is more than just technology and is not about duplicating a person’s mind. Its role is to provide a process to facilitate the collection of information and use the firm’s infrastructure to make it available to others. (12) (19) Is knowledge management only a temporary project that organizations are implementing? Nigel Oxbrow who is the managing director of the information services company TFPL, states that at a summit of 12 chief knowledge officers (CKO) in October 1997, all were in agreement that their positions in the firm would not last. This presents the notion that knowledge management as a short-term fix, so management can get their hands around their current knowledge in the firm and stop the process. For knowledge management to be effective it must be able to change dynamically as competitive forces in the market changes and as the organization itself changes. The basis for these changes will be new customer needs, regulatory issues, new technology, management style changes and new treats from competitors. As the knowledge requirements change, the company’s knowledge management process will also have to change to accommodate these new requirements or become ineffective. (8) (24) If you do not have upper management’s support your knowledge management strategy will only be a fad. It is obvious that for any project to succeed you must have senior management support and experts commonly agree this is one of the key factors for successful knowledge management projects. Still this can be a problem, as Kaisa KauttoKoivula says pilot knowledge programs attempted at Nokia initially failed because of limited support from top management. The main reason for the lack of support was some of management did not know the projects were taking place or what benefits could be expected from the pilot programs. This ties into the above concept of understanding what is knowledge management. Management support is crucial. For this reason, one should examine the barriers of knowledge sharing, thus gaining a better understanding of this concept. (11) Barriers to knowledge sharing. Before an organization can develop a successful knowledge management process, the company must understand the barriers to sharing knowledge and develop methods in their planning to overcome them. Barriers can include organizational structure barriers, boundary barriers, management support barriers, and technology barriers. This section will highlight these barriers and provide approaches with examples of how some organizations are successfully dealing with the barriers to knowledge management. A study conducted in 1994, to determine why best practices did not transfer well between sections within the same organization, showed a successful method of performing a certain procedure would go unnoticed or shared for years. Once the best practice is identified it would take an average of two years before the method migrated to

other sections to use within the company. Gabriel Szulanski, who led the research, stated there were four barriers that caused the delay in identifying and sharing the best practices in the firm. They include the following: (17)
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"Ignorance": This means the person with the information didn’t think anyone could use it and others in the company did not know anyone had the knowledge. "No absorptive capacity": Once the method was recognized, the firm has no process or resources to capture the best practice. "The lack of preexisting relationships": The separate sections have no interaction with each other. Normally people acquire knowledge from someone they admire, know or interact with. Seldom will one adapt another person’s new process if that person does not have a relationship already established. "Lack of motivation": The benefit of using the new method and how it can help my department may not be fully understood.

Organizational Structure Barriers The above barriers identified in Szulanski’s study are mostly organizational and management driven. Carla O’Dell and C. Jackson Grayson categorize five organizational structures for transferring knowledge. Management can use this categorization to assess which category most resembles their company and use this information as a good starting point for preparing the firm’s knowledge management implementation plan. The five organizational groups include: (17)
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"The Silo Company Inc". This type of organization provides no incentive to share information with other departments, because the focus is on their own section. Characteristically a manager in this type of company would say, "when it comes to bonus time, we play a zero-sum game around here. To get my share of the bonus pool, I have to take it away from someone else. Why should I share my best ideas?" (p.18). "The Not Invented Here (NIH) Company Inc". This company structure values unique ideas rather than sharing information. Employees in this type of company will not want to use others knowledge, because the culture does not encourage it. "The Babel Company Inc". This firm may want to share and use other department’s best practices, but they have no common language between them. Each section has their own terminology to explain what they do and others cannot understand them. For example, this is sometimes a problem in the military with our use of acronyms. In one branch of the service they use a certain set of acronyms to describe their process of accomplishing a certain project. When the branch tries to transfer the project’s explanation to another branch, they have difficulties determining what was meant, because the receiving branch uses the same acronyms with different meanings. "The By-The-Book Company Inc". This organization structure greatly values explicit knowledge and misses out on the real valuable tacit knowledge. Ikujiro Nonaka says, "the centerpiece of the Japanese approach is the recognition that creating new knowledge is not simply a manner of ‘processing’ objective

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information. Rather, it depends on tapping the tacit and often highly subjective insight, intuitions, and hunches of individual employees and making those insights available for testing and use by the company as a whole" (Nonaka, p.24). "The Bolt-It-On Company". This organization believes in making sharing an additional responsibility on top of everyone’s regular job. They expect it to work, but it normally doesn’t. Kautto-Koivula, states Nokia learned a valuable lesson of not pushing their knowledge management program onto the employees from top down. Nokia’s employees are not interested or enthusiastic about another new responsibility being given to them by management. (11)

Once management identifies which organization structure category they belong in, they must determine what can help them eliminate the barriers preventing their organization from sharing knowledge. The key component is creating a knowledge infrastructure, which includes processes, technology, groups of people and organizational structure. Carla O’Dell and C. Jackson Grayson present three approaches to infrastructure designed to help management plan their own strategy. The three methods include selfdirected, knowledge services and networks, and facilitated transfer. Each approach builds on the other and can counter different barriers. An explanation of the three methods follows. (17) The self-directed method helps to counter the problem of others not knowing that the knowledge already exists in the organization. The approach focuses on capturing information and making it available for others to use. The employees access the knowledge base’s repository to get the information they need, when they need it. This method can also include systems that direct the user to someone who can help them. An example of this method is a Yellow Pages system, that basically serves as a map of expertise or who knows what in the organization. Deere & Co. contracted with Teltech Resources Network Corp. in Minneapolis, to develop a network where their employees could contact an expert when they needed one. The system allows users to quickly find an expert within the organization based on the experts knowledge and not by the jobs they held. The head of Deere’s metals research Bruce Boardman, claims the system has been very successful and well worth the cost. This system is especially essential when the production line has gone down and they need expert help immediately. (17) (22) The next method of knowledge services and networks expands on the self-directing approach. According to O’Dell and Grayson, this method has "knowledge managers and knowledge integrators add value by scanning the flow of information, and organizing or ‘packaging’ knowledge into more digestible and applicable format" (p.115). Another key aspect of this approach is the use of groups getting together to share knowledge and learn from each other. Ernst & Young International’s knowledge management system demonstrates some of these components. When their engagement teams complete a project, the team has an enormous amount of material collected. The team gets together and decides on what material is most valuable to share with others. The team then packages the material based on the firm’s policy and submits the package to the

company’s Center for Business Knowledge. One container used to provide the information to others in the firm is "PowerPacks". "PowerPacks" are a condensed version of the best information available on a certain subject. These containers can have only 50 megabytes to make their use by users on the road easier. Artenis March writes, "PowerPacks were credited with being a major contributor to E & Y’s recent reduction in proposal turnaround time from two to three weeks to two to three days" (p.15). (15) (17) The last approach of facilitated transfer makes designated personnel responsible for assisting others in the knowledge sharing process. It includes the functions from the other two methods and adds a dedicated team to facilitate the process. Amoco Corporation started a program based on this approach by selecting employees throughout their organization to become assistants to help others share knowledge. These knowledge assistants are responsible for coaching others in how to use the technology and participate in the process. The program has been very successful in getting people throughout the company together to discuss problems and lessons learned. This approach facilitates building the relationships needed to get people to use knowledge from others and it aids in providing the motivation needed to use the knowledge, because they are learning first hand how it can benefit their department by using the other section’s best practices. (17) Boundary Barriers Boundaries within the organization must open up to stimulate the flow of information between departments. Harvard Business School professor David Garvin says, "opening up boundaries, with conferences, meetings, and project teams, which either cross organizational levels or link the company and its customers and suppliers, ensure a fresh flow of ideas and the chance to consider competing perspectives" (p.76). Kodak learned this lesson when they were trying to develop a new line of products based on digital imaging. The company invested $5 billion on research and development, without accomplishing their goals. The main problem was departmental boundaries made communication among the 23 separate teams difficult and each team was working in their own vacuum. In 1993, the company’s new CEO George Fisher, noticed the problem and created one division from all the separate groups. This action was instrumental in Kodak’s success in digital imaging. The whole group was able to collaborate with each other once they removed the boundaries and in 1994, Kodak’s sales totaled $500 million and they made an estimated $1 billion in 1996. (10) (20) Management Support Barriers The lack of management involvement and support can build a barrier preventing the development of an effective knowledge management program. As with any new project a firm commits to accomplishing, the organization must have management’s commitment to be successful. General Electric has a program in place for getting their managers involved in cultivating their employees knowledge. The program is called Work-Out and consist of conducting town hall meetings between employees and their managers. The employees present methods to improve their business processes and their managers must make a decision to implement the recommendation or not at the meeting. This process

encourages management support and helps to create a learning environment in the company. Texas Instruments started having an annual event in 1996, to encourage and recognize sharing within their organization. The day of sharing is called "ShareFair" and best practice teams from the company, show their accomplishments to everyone attending. The annual event has been very successful and brings management and employees together to award their sharing efforts. This type of event helps to keep management involved in the knowledge sharing process and will better the program’s chances for success. (17) (20) Technology Barriers The technology a firm’s selects to enable their knowledge management strategy can cause another barrier to sharing knowledge. Andrew Bottomley, a research director of investment analysts at Durlacher Research, says "The common denominator amongst most of the knowledge technologies is that they do not work...There are very few vendors of knowledge management tools who could claim, hand on heart, that they have technology which needs only tweaking rather than ongoing re-engineering. Very often the excuse is that business processes need to change in order that the new technology can deliver" (p.25-26). Information technology does not ensure knowledge sharing among employees, it’s provides the tools needed to speedup and assist in the knowledge process. If management selects a type of product mentioned above knowing they must change their business process to match the technology, then the knowledge project will fail. Management must select a technology solution that fulfills their knowledge needs or design one that will. (3) Steps to Having a Successful Knowledge Management Program. In order to understand the steps to implementing a knowledge management strategy, management can learn the best practices from those companies that have been successful in implementing their knowledge projects. Thomas Davenport, David De Long and Michael Beers conducted a study of twenty-four companies who are conducting knowledge management projects. The research found eight key elements were common to all the successful projects. The success factors included: (5) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. The projects are tied to a financial impact of either earning or saving the firm money. The companies had the organizational and technology infrastructure in place to manage and support the project. The project is organized to maintain flexibility and provide users with easy access to the information they needed. The firms’ employees enjoyed sharing knowledge and were positive about the process. Everyone understood the scope and purpose of the projects. The system inspired and encouraged knowledge sharing amongst the employees. The project provided different methods to include face to face collaboration,

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to facilitate sharing knowledge. Management remained involved in the process and supported the project.

Some of these factors are addressed, as a barrier management needed to understand and develop methods in their plan to overcome. Seeing them listed as key success factors identified by the study reinforces the importance they provide to the firm’s knowledge program. The other elements are covered below in the steps to implementing a successful project. Project Management. Implementing a knowledge management program should be managed like any other project the organization decides to execute. According to Jeffery Whitten and Lonnie Bentley, "project management is the process of defining, planning, directing, monitoring, and controlling the development of an acceptable system at a minimum cost within a specified time frame" (p.595). The project management approach will better tie the knowledge project to the firm’s business plan and guide the project through completion. The important reasons for using project management is the following: (26)
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It provides scope to the knowledge program. This includes defining the project, which identifies the executive sponsor who pays for the project and the project champion who sells it to management. The definition states the problem or opportunity the project will address, the goal of the project, project objectives and assumptions and constraints. If management cannot agree on the purpose of the project, it will fail before it begins. It provides task planning and project team staffing. This includes creating the team who will implement the knowledge project and planning each phase of the operation. It provides an organization and schedule of the project effort. Here members of the team understand their roles and responsibilities and they determine when the tasks must be completed. It provides the project with direction and control. This includes monitoring and measuring the components of the project to ensure it remains on time and within the scope of the project.

The real key to using project management to guide the knowledge project is if the benefits of the project are not justified to management, the project will loose management’s support. Project management accomplishes this through the project sponsor and through providing project planning. Planning the project based on using a system analysis approach will facilitate having a good base to the firm’s knowledge project. The reason for this is that the users who will use the system are involved in the planning process and it helps to identify what they need and want as far as what information will help them to perform their job. Peter Vogel, who is an applications

system supervisor at Champion Road Machinery, warns not to allow your system designers to design your knowledgebase without user input. Based on his experience he says, "if it is going to be useful to the company, it must be useful to the vast majority of the staff. It must be set up to map to their vision of the world, their ways of getting to knowledge. The only people capable of ensuring that happens are those users" (p.3). Peter Vogel’s comments echo the need to plan the project using the system analysis approach to ensure the users input is part of your system. If you design the system without identifying the user's needs the project will fail in getting the users to use the system and share knowledge amongst them. (25) (26) Up front the majority of the benefits provided by knowledge management system is intangible and is difficult to measure. This means the first knowledge projects the firm plans to develop should be smaller pilot projects that can quickly demonstrate benefits to everyone in the company. Kaisa Kautto-Koivula says, "it’s very important to chose the right part of the company for the first pilot because you want to be able to show some real benefits in a short period of time. People have a certain attention span and only so much patience -–after that they will make a judgement that the idea or the pilot is a failure" (p.27). This is important for any future knowledge projects the organization attempts to implement. If the users have a negative feeling towards the pilot program that failed, this will build a difficult barrier to overcome when launching other knowledge sharing projects in the company. (11) One approach management can use to planning their initial knowledge management projects to build support is to implement what David Garvin calls "ongoing programs and one-of-a-kind demonstration projects" (p.56). The ongoing programs consist of conducting a number of small projects that result in gradual knowledge gains for the firm. These projects attempt to keep fresh ideas flowing in the organization. For example, Chaparral Steel uses a simple method of sending their line managers to "visit academic and industry leaders, develop an understanding of new technologies, then bring what they’ve learned back to the company and apply it to daily operations" (Ibid.). This approach assisted Chaparral in being one of the world’s top five, lowest cost steel manufacturers. Demonstration projects require more planning because the size and complexity is greater. Garvin states "they involve holistic, system wide changes, introduced at a single site, and are often undertaken with the goal of developing new organizational capabilities" (p.57-58). He provides GM’s Saturn Division as an example of this, by the way they changed how they produce and sell their cars. A Company can plan to use this approach to implement their knowledge project at one of their high payoff departments, to demonstrate success before including the entire organization. (10) Information Needs. To begin planning a knowledge management program the company must determine who will need what information, when do they need it and how will they get it. Brook Manville and Nathaniel Foote state, "a company has to know the kind of value it intends to provide and to whom. Only then can it link its knowledge resources in a way that makes a difference..." (March, p.1). One approach is to conduct an audit to determine

what their needs are and determine areas they would like to improve. The systems analysis technique can assist in determining the information needs by using interviews, surveys and joint application development sessions to determine what the user wants. (15) (26) Determine a Strategy. Once the information needs have been determined the project must be associated with the company’s business strategy to be successful. Harry M. Lasker, co-chairman of Renaissance Solutions consulting company, confirms this by saying, "you should not map the knowledge of your organization if you cannot link it to strategy or performance that pushes the strategy" (Stewart & Kaufman, p.1). Joel Yanowitz identifies three broad strategies and goals a firm can pursue with their knowledge program and they consist of: (19) (21)
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The library model: the goal is to capture what people already know and make it available to others who can use it. A key component is turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge that everyone can use. Community of interest: the purpose of this model is to bring people with common bonds together to share knowledge. This encourages networks of people in the firm who have a common interest to collaborate and build on the shared knowledge from the group. Shape how people learn: this model’s objective "is to improve the quality of people’s contribution to the organization through enhancing their ability to see, make sense of and act on the situations they find themselves in" (Yanowitz, p.1). The focus is on organizational learning through forums and etc.

These strategies are broad and allow the company to look at the strategy they plan to implement in different dimensions. These dimensions can become consolidated into one strategy to form the firm’s knowledge program. The next step is to determine in what area will sharing knowledge help to improve performance or increase profits. The company does this by selecting what they will focus their program on by selecting a value proposition to pursue. Selecting a Value Proposition to Focus the Knowledge Program. For knowledge sharing to be valuable to the organization it must have a focus. This means the company must decide the purpose and scope of their knowledge program. Carla O’Dell and C. Jackson Grayson call this step in the knowledge management plan, the value proposition selection. They believe this is a critical first step to ensure: resources are appropriately directed to the best areas, it will ensure the correct knowledge is transferred within the organization and it helps to get management’s financial backing and support. The three value propositions according to O’Dell and Grayson, that management can select from to focus their program consist of customer intimacy,

product-to-market and operational excellence. The value proposition selected should relate to the company’s competitive advantage strategy. For example, Sequent selected customer intimacy because they found their customers valued the knowledge their sales personnel displayed. Sequent designed their system to quickly get knowledge and best practices to their sales force to improve their competitive position with their customers. The key is that the value proposition focuses the firm’s knowledge effort and ties it to their business strategy. This greatly increases the opportunity for a successful project. (17) Customer Intimacy Proposition Customer intimacy focuses on keeping the organization’s customers and ensuring their satisfaction. The system that supports this proposition is designed to capture customer knowledge and use the firm’s knowledge to help the customer solve any problems they have. To accomplish this the company can provide their employees, who work with the customers, the knowledge they need to work through the customers’ problems. This can include arming the sales force with tools to access and capture knowledge, creating call in centers to provide employees quick access to information and getting the employees all the information the company has on the customer. The earlier example of Deere’s yellow pages system would be an example of the call in center. USAA developed their knowledge management system based on this proposition, because they wanted to satisfy their customers’ needs in one phone call. Their system allows each service employee to access all knowledge the firm has about a customer or any problems, while they are talking to the customer. It also gives the employee information on the best methods, which can help the service assistant to solve issues, the customers may have. The program captures information about customer satisfaction and shares this information with all employees. Everyone knows how he or she and their section are doing. USAA also developed the ECHO (Every Contact Has Opportunity) program to obtain customer’s feedback. Based on a real-time database, the system captures information about customers and provides the sales personnel with the firm’s knowledge of best practices and other information. The result of this customer focus system is that the company has the highest customer retention rate in the industry at 98%. (17) Product-to-Market Proposition The product-to-market proposition focuses on getting products to the market successfully and as fast as the company can. Ikujiro Nonaka emphasizes the purpose of this proposition by stating "when markets shift, technologies proliferate, competitors multiply, and products become obsolete almost overnight, successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization, and quickly embody it in new technologies and products" (p.22). One method in assisting this approach is to decrease new product development by utilizing experience gained from past development projects. This reduces the recreating the wheel syndrome by using past lessons learned. It seems like a simple proposition to execute, just use the firm’s past knowledge to repeat success and be able to accomplish it quicker.

McDonald’s Corporation demonstrates this is not always that simple. McDonald’s had a period where they were launching new products like the McPizza, The McLean and the Arch Deluxe that all bombed. A 1997 Fortune article said, "In the good old days at McDonald’s, most new product ideas came from the field. The Egg McMuffin, the Hot Apple Pie...even the Big Mac were cooked up in operator’s kitchen" (O’Dell & Grayson, p.49). The difference was the new products that failed were ideas coming from the top of the corporation and not from the franchises were they came from before. Information and knowledge sharing between the two was no longer occurring like it did in the past. When Jack Greenberg took over as McDonald’s CEO in 1998, he started to change this by allowing the field managers to make the decision to allow customers to order their food made to order. His efforts to get the communication flowing again between the corporation and the franchises are paying off. In 1998 McDonald’s shares increased by 40%. (16) (17) Operational Excellence Proposition The last proposition is achieving operational excellence, which focuses on cost reduction and increasing performance. This method looks at identifying the best practices within an organization and transferring them throughout the company to increase every section’s performance. Skandia, a Swedish insurance company, developed an approach to reuse their experience throughout their company. The company uses a group of common practices that can transfer between divisions. For example, when the company starts a new business, they utilize the administrative staff from other business sections from within their organization, to decrease the initiation costs and get the new business section up and operational quicker. This is accomplished by using their existing expertise to launch the new section. This also provides the benefit of incorporating the new business unit faster into the firm, by teaching them the best company’s best practices up front. This sharing process reduces new business startup time to seven moths, as compared to the industry average of seven years. (17) Knowledge Management’s Supporting Enablers. Once the organization determines which proposition that best supports their business need, management must create the necessary environment to facilitate knowledge sharing. This step to successfully implementing a knowledge program leverages four enablers to transfer knowledge. The four include culture, technology, infrastructure and measure. Poorly preparing anyone of these enablers or putting too much emphasis on one of the areas can cause the system to fail. Covered below are the critical enablers for success. (17) Culture The organization’s culture can either make or break the knowledge management system. If the firm’s culture is to share information, then this enabler will be one of the four pillars to creating a strong system. According to O’Dell and Grayson, "culture is the combination of shared history, expectations, unwritten rules, and social moves that

affects the behavior of everyone, from managers to mailroom clerks. It’s the set of underlying beliefs that, while never exactly articulated, are always there to color the perception of actions and communications" (p.71). Culture is important because true learning occurs among individuals interacting together and they must be willing to share their tacit knowledge to have an effective system. John Peetz, a consulting partner at Ernst & Young International, emphasizes this by saying, "true knowledge-sharing culture, one in which an individual will willingly rely on the work of another individual whom they have never met, and whose name they might not even be able to pronounce" (March, p.11). Giovanni Piazza, a developer of Ernst & Young’s knowledge management systems also echoes the importance of culture on the firm’s knowledge system, when he said, "if people don’t want to share, they are not going to do it even if you have the best technology in the world. People won’t share if they don’t see what’s in it for them" (Ibid. p.3). These statements emphasize the point that the organization’s culture must support sharing and provide an incentive to use the process. (15) (17) A good starting point for planning how this enabler will support the firm’s knowledge program is to access the current culture in terms of how well the company supports sharing. O’Dell and Grayson present a test in their book to determine if the firm’s current culture supports sharing or not. The following table is an adaptation of their test that appears on page 72 in their book. (17) Does Your Current Culture Support Sharing Yes If:
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No If: People learn by sharing knowledge with each other and through teaching. Past lessons and story telling are used by everyone to facilitate community understanding. Ideas are constantly shared as new experiences create new knowledge. The firm has groups of people with common interest who collaborate with each other. The firm is willing to share issues and problems to learn as a group from them. Relationships exist between and across section boundaries.
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Incentive system does not encourage sharing or creates a barrier to sharing. No time is provided or no mechanism is in place to capture lessons learned. "Assumptions about projects or activities are not challenged". Promotions and hiring of new employees is "based on technical expertise". Past failures are buried because no one wants to talk about them. Each department has their own vision and culture that creates a barrier to sharing with other sections.

The above table allows the company to see how far they must go to create a culture that will support knowledge sharing. The question that arises, is it possible to change the organization’s culture? Ed Schein, Professor of Management Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management says, "the way I look at culture is that culture is a product of a group’s history. That history was determined in large part by the group’s actual experience in its environment and is very stable once it is formed. You can’t manipulate that very well. It’s an emergent phenomenon...If they institute a new way of working like empowerment or teamwork or whatever, and if that produces better results, then a new culture will form" (p.5). Professor Schein’s comments emphasize changing your culture is possible, but it is not an easy task. Management cannot just dictate the new culture is sharing and expect it to happen. O’Dell and Grayson believe a firm’s culture is changeable and they provide six recommendations on how to accomplish it. They include the following: (17) (19)
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Management must adapt the attitude that their employees want to share knowledge. Management must set the example. Chevron’s CEO Ken Derr says, "I think that a CEO should lead by example. This means participating and showing that you are personally committed to learning and the process of change. Whenever I visit with employee groups, I tell them sharing and using best practices is the single most important thing they can do" (p.76). Create the need for knowledge. Peggy Odem, knowledge management director for American Productivity and Quality Center, states you need to design your knowledge system "so that they can’t do a good job without it, or can do their job even better and more easily because of it. Then you get the behavior you want" (March, p.5). (15) Create team relationships. This enables tacit knowledge to flow and as Thomas Stewart says, "individual talent is great, but it walks out the door. Interdisciplinary teams capture, formalize, and capitalize talent; it becomes less dependent on any individual" (Stewart, p.8). This helps to counter the earlier discussed personnel turnover problem. If an employee leaves, others in the team know what they knew and the impact of them leaving is not as great. (20) Encourage responsibility for the knowledge process. Peter Drucker believes this is very important for establishing an information-based organization. All personnel must take responsibility for information. He says, "the key to such a system is that everyone asks who in this organization depends on me for what information? And on whom, in turn, do I depend? Each person’s list will always include supervisors and subordinates. But most important names on it will be those of colleagues, people with whom one’s primary relationship is coordination" (p.11). (9) Provide a common purpose for sharing. This means instilling the idea in the employees that sharing is important to accomplishing the business goal and their own goals.

The above list of recommendations allows the company to determine how they can plan to change their culture to emphasize sharing. The next question is how does the firm actually encourage the personnel to share his or her knowledge? Does the firm offer incentives or not? If they do decide to use incentives, which ones work? O’Dell and Grayson say "telling everybody that between 5 and 6 P.M. they should be contributing knowledge, and that if they do, they will get a mouse pad, won’t change the way people work" (p.83). (170 The company must decide if they will use incentives or not and answer the above questions. Buckman Laboratories knowledge management system has been very successful without using financial incentives. The company uses a private forum on CompuServe to allow employees to post questions and receive answers. The firm’s CEO Robert Buckman says, "if you promote the people who do the best job of sharing, you don’t need any other incentives" (Stewart & Kaufman, p.3). Ernst & Young on the other hand, make knowledge sharing part of every person’s evaluation and link their contributions to financial incentives. This approach makes sharing their daily culture. When making the incentive decision, a key point to remember is stated by O’Dell and Grayson who found, "only a minority of firms use formal financial rewards to promote sharing behavior. Instead, successful firms place big focus on a personal responsibility strategy, and embedding knowledge development and transfer into their employees’ professional and career development systems" (p.83). (17) (21) Technology Information technology (IT) is the most visible part of the organization’s knowledge management program. The purpose of this enabler is to provide the tools needed to connect users together to share knowledge. Having an IT solution in place will not cause knowledge sharing to occur by itself, but it will facilitate it by providing speed and access. There are a number of vendors who are making knowledge applications that the firm must evaluate to determine if the package will support their business needs or not. In this section the basic knowledge management IT components will be discussed. Common technologies include a knowledgebase, GroupWare and Intranets. (25) A knowledgebase simply provides the organization with a repository to collect the knowledge that the firm decided in earlier steps to capture. Borghoff and Pareschi calls this repository a corporate memory and say, " a corporate memory is an explicit, disembodied, persistent representation of knowledge and information in an organization" (p.18). They continue by stating that the corporate memory should store any information that will contribute to the firm’s performance. This can include knowledge about their business processes, customers, marketing strategies, goals and etc. Knowledgebase technology is fairly simple to implement by using a database on a server and providing the users with a search engine interface. Microsoft’s Internet Information Server version 4.0 and Index Server 2.0 provide one method of accomplishing a knowledgebase. The administrator places the content into the repository and the Index Server automatically indexes the material, so a Web page with a search engine dialog box can access the

information. The user then types the key words in the dialog box and the search engine will return the results to them. (2) There are a number of ways to implement a knowledgebase. Borghoff and Pareschi present the following four methods: (2)
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"The knowledge attic": This is an archive of knowledge that is accessible whenever it is needed. It is a passive pull type system, which means the information waits in the data store for the user to come and retrieve it. The NASA Space Engineering Lessons Learned (SELL) program is an example of this type system. System engineers, who uses SELL, submit and retrieve lessons learned by filling out an electronic form and sending it to the system. To ease the retrieval process the lessons learned is broken down into predefined domain. These domains include materials, general, optics and etc. "The knowledge sponge": This differs from above in the fact that the knowledge collection process is active rather than passive. This means the firm has a mechanism in place to collect knowledge and make it available for users to pull the information when they need it. "The knowledge publisher": This knowledgebase implementation still requires the user to submit lessons learned to the data store, but it actively distributes information to users. The personnel who maintain the knowledgebase review the incoming information, pull out the items that are relevant to certain groups and send the information to them. The Department of Energy Lessons Learned program uses this type of system. The process consists of: (1) Submitting lessons learned using nonelectronic standard format; (2) Technical experts view the lesson learned before being stored on their Internet server; (3) Pertinent lessons learned are distributed to local managers who intern decide which personnel will benefit from the knowledge and ensure they receive it. "The knowledge pump": This method actively distributes and collects lessons learned. Borghoff and Pareschi state with this knowledgebase "the management of the organization enforce an efficient functioning of the lessons learned cycle" (p.28). The Center of Army Lessons Learned (CALL) provides an example of this type system. The online system collects lessons learned by allowing soldiers to submit their observations to CALL’s Web site. In addition, CALL has a section whose mission is to actively collect lessons for particular subjects in the Army. The information is accessible on the Internet and CALL sends newsletters, handbooks and bulletins to the units. The author has personal experience using information that CALL has sent out to the units to plan operations on peacekeeping operations and unit inactivation. The material was a great source of knowledge and was very helpful.

Once a company selects a knowledgebase method to implement, Peter Vogel provides eight recommendations to ensure the firm’s repository is used and remains effective. The eight include: (25) 1. 2. 3. Make sure the material is what the users needs. Ensure the system grows by adding new content. Make the system easy for the user to personalize the access; for example, the way in which Yahoo now allows their users to select how they want information presented to them. Make it easy to find information. Use common tools that are easy to use. Allow your knowledgebase to reach out to other sources of information. Make the system easy to maintain or once the system is no longer relevant, the users will no longer use it. Get users involved in the planning process, so the designers understand their needs.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

GroupWare applications provide a method of supporting collaboration amongst teams and individuals that are working together. GroupWare is another important tool for implementing a firm’s knowledge management program, especially when it comes to sharing tacit knowledge. National Semiconductor, Buckman Laboratories, World Bank and Texas Instruments all are successful at using Lotus Notes as part of their knowledge programs. Andersen Worldwide developed a system based on using Lotus Notes called ANet, which they use to link their entire worldwide operation in 76 countries. Andersen employees anywhere in the company can post customer’s problems to the organizational forum and receive information and ideas from other users on how to help the customer. The system has become very successful, but according to Quinn, Anderson and Finkelstein, "major changes in incentives and culture were needed to make the system work...To stimulate a cultural shift toward wider use of ANet, senior partners deliberately posed questions on employees’ E-mail files each morning ‘to be answered by 10’. Until those cultural changes were in place, ANet was less than successful despite its technological elegance" (p.195). This last statement emphasizes the interdependency that exists among the four enablers. (17) (18) The next IT component to facilitate knowledge sharing is the creation of Intranets. Intranets consists of a network that is internal to an organization used to connect employees and the firm’s systems together. O’Dell and Grayson state the benefits to implementing an Intranet for knowledge sharing are numerous. The benefits include having decreased communication costs, making information more available and quick to access, providing an easier ability to collaborate amongst team members, and cheaper cost implementing the technology. Meta Group Inc., a market research and consulting firm, surveyed 55 companies in 1997, to determine if Intranet applications provide the firms with a positive return on investment (ROI). Their findings showed "80 percent of companies surveyed generated a positive ROI, with an average annualized return of 38 percent" (p.94). The above example shows implementing an Intranet not only allows your

users to connect with each other, but it can generate a positive ROI. This is an important benefit to show management when conducting a cost-benefit analysis of their knowledge program. (17) Infrastructure The infrastructure enabler provides the organizational structure to support the firm’s knowledge program. The different types of infrastructure a company can select is discussed in a prior section on organizational structure barriers. It is key to ensure that if a company creates organizational units to facilitate the sharing process, they understand their roles and responsibilities. A company can appoint a Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) to help implement their knowledge program. This person will have the overall responsibility of building the firm’s knowledge management infrastructure and developing their strategic knowledge approach. Surprisingly a lot of organizations have not appointed a CKO. Daniel Holtshouse, director of knowledge initiatives at Xerox, estimates only a fifth of FORTUNE 500 companies have a CKO. The possible reason for this may be knowledge management is still a fairly new concept. For some companies they view the position as being critical to their success. Ernst & Young is one company that believes the CKO position is instrumental and this is echoed by their current CKO John Peetz who says, " For us, knowledge management is critical. It’s one of our four core processes – sell work, do work, manage people, and manage knowledge" (Stewart, p.2). The author agrees with Stewart’s article that the CKO position is crucial, because if someone is not performing the job, it is highly likely the responsibilities are being neglected and not performed. This can result in the firm’s knowledge program lacking the leadership, guidance and upper level management support needed to thrive. (15) (23) Measure The measure enabler is the weakest developed of the four enablers, because measuring the benefits and use of the knowledge management system is difficult. Most benefits resulting from the firm’s knowledge program are intangible. This enabler is important, because if the project manager cannot show management the results from the program, the program will likely loose its funding. Tracking how many times the content is accessed is relatively easy and this function is built into most systems like Microsoft’s Index Server. The hard part is tracking how the knowledge is being used. Artemis March highlights this issue by saying, "usage is more difficult to assess, especially when data can be accessed remotely. In particular, the number of ‘hits’ on an entry in a knowledge base is only a fuzzy indicator of value; it says very little about how often or how well people are using an idea" (p.5). An alternate method to tracking usage is to use surveys, questionnaires, interviews or direct observation to assess how the knowledge is impacting on the firm’s learning process. For example, David Garvin says, "At its 1989 Worldwide Marketing Manager meeting, Ford presented participants with a series of hypothetical situations in which customer complaints were in conflict with short-term dealer or Company profit goals and asked how they would respond. Surveys like these are the first step toward identifying changed attitudes and new ways of thinking" (p.74). (10) (15)

The example above demonstrates the difficulty of planning how to use this enabler to measure your knowledge system. One technique the organization can use is to conduct a cost-benefits analysis and link it to the value proposition they selected to focus their program earlier. For example, they can measure customer retention rate and cross-selling penetration for the customer intimacy proposition. Under product leadership look at percentage of revenues for new products and new product success ratios. Measure cost per unit, inventory carrying costs or production cycle time if they are pursuing the operational excellence proposition. In summary, measurement is a critical and difficult component to track, but it is extremely necessary to continue receiving management’s support of the knowledge program. (17) The Knowledge Management Process. The knowledge management process generally consists of four phases and is important to be understood before the company plans and designs their knowledge strategy. The four phases will be covered next and consists of the following: generating content, organizing content, developing content and distributing content. Generating Process The first phase consist of identifying what the knowledge content will be for the system and getting users to contribute their ideas. Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak present five modes of knowledge generation that a firm can use to plan how they will generate their knowledge content. The five modes consist of the following: (7)
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"Acquisition": The firm has four choices to acquiring knowledge. They can create new knowledge, use knowledge that is already in the company, buy it through purchasing a company or hire someone who has it and lease or rent knowledge through outsourcing. IBM’s purchase of Lotus in 1995 for $3.5 billion is an example of this. The price is estimated at 14 times the book value of the company. IBM made the purchase to acquire Lotus’ knowledge of GroupWare applications like their Lotus Notes. "Dedicated Resources": This means the firm establishes dedicated groups or units that focus on generating knowledge. An R&D section would be an example of this type of group. The section has more freedom to experiment with new ideas on developing knowledge. "Fusion": This mode brings people together with different views to work on a project and it forces them to develop an answer within the group. The five key principles to making this work are: (1) Demonstrating the value of the knowledge being sought to the group; (2) Select the key employees who can make the fusion concept work; (3) Focus on creativity; (4) Show the group the need for their effort; and (5) Provide the members milestones to gage their success. "Adaptation: A firm’s ability to adapt is dependent on two principal factors: first, having existing internal resources and capabilities that can be utilized in new ways, and second, being open to change or having a high

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‘absorptive capacity’. The most important adaptive resources are employees who can acquire new knowledge and skills easily" (p.5). This means encouraging employees to gain more skills and experience different ways of performing their job. "Networks": Bring groups of people together with common interest to share their expertise and solve issues together. This is critical to obtaining the employee’s tacit knowledge.

Organizing Process This process takes the information that has been collected from the generation process and organizing it, so it can be presented to the users electronically and allow them to access it. Earlier examples of Ernst & Young’s PowerPacks, which provide the best 50 megabytes of material available on a certain topic and NASA’s SELL program breaking the subjects into different domains is an example of content organization. (15) Developing Process The development process actively takes generated material and refines the information to make it even more valuable to the users. This process is very similar to organizing and sometimes the two are considered the same. One implementation of this process has subject matter experts reviewing the content or online communications to determine which material they want to cultivate further. The selected information is packaged, its importance identified and it is prepared for the next phase. An example of this process is how Andersen Worldwide has their Global Best Practices (GBP) group, monitor their online systems to find information they can pullout, further refine and create knowledge packages from. Robert Hiebeler, who is in charge of developing the firm’s GBP says, "we monitor daily the questions being raised in our divergent systems by all practice areas. Our goal is to identify trends; sometimes, that generates proactive research" (March, p.6). (15) Distributing Process This process covers how people will access the knowledge. The goal of this process is to make it easy for the users to find the knowledge they need and encourage them to continue to use the system. This phase uses the firm’s selected IT solution to either push or pull the information the users need. According to March, "knowledge managers at both Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young believe the pull systems are less desirable, largely because the typical consultant is too busy to spend time searching for specific data, frameworks, or tools" (p.3). Push technologies can have a drawback of providing to much information to the user. Management must decide how to best deliver the knowledge to their users. New uses of technology like personalizing access to databases with using something like CNN’s my news for example, to allow the user to select what information they get and in the way they want it. The application Point Cast is another example where information the user wants is pushed to their system using IP multicasting. The future of

the delivery process will be in these types of personalized applications; designed to let the user be involved in selecting the method they receive the knowledge from the organization’s knowledge program. (15) Bringing the Knowledge Management System Together. The last step involved in preparing the firm’s knowledge management program is the actual planning, design and implementation of the program. The best way to accomplish this is to use a systems analysis and design methodology to provide the framework needed to complete this step. Using a methodology will incorporate the steps the author covered and gain the benefits from managing the program like a project, getting the users input and providing a systems approach to ensure the selected solution solves the user and business needs. This will help to ensure the project succeeds. (26) To summarize the key points of putting the system together, the firm must know the barriers that exist within their company and plan how they will overcome them. They must determine their information needs, select a value proposition to focus their effort, plot their culture improvement plan, find a balance between the four enablers, plan the execution process, design and implement the system. A critical point to remember when planning is to make the system more than a static collection of knowledge just being shared. The best practices in the company’s knowledgebases should not be a checklist that must be followed by everyone in hopes of repeating success. The real power that can be unleashed by the knowledge program, is the best practices spark the user to do it even better. The user should view the best practice as a guide or course of action, but not the absolute solution. Building this attitude is part of the planning and training to the users. Your knowledge facilitator staff can play a big part by training the users to view the best practices in that way. This can even lead to a more successful knowledge program. (13) (17) The concept of knowledge management and the benefits it can provide an organization will continue to grow. Firms like Buckman Laboratories, Texas Instruments, Dow Chemical, Kaiser Permanente, CIGNA Property & Casualty, Skandia, Chevron, USAA, IBM and others are successfully demonstrating how knowledge management programs are making them more competitive and making them money. The vast advancements in technology will lead these companies and others who start programs, to having even a better program in the future. Improvements in push technologies are now allowing the user to select the knowledge they want and when they want it. GroupWare applications are making group and individual collaboration even easier to facilitate the transfer of tacit knowledge between them. These factors will make the knowledge management a business imperative to maintain or provide the firm competitive advantage in the future.

Conclusion This research provides a firm wanting to implement a knowledge management strategy with valuable information to prepare their plan. It can help an organization to counter the lost productivity and knowledge when their experienced personnel leave, it helps to foster the idea of sharing knowledge within the firm and it allows the company to capture their best practices and lessons learned. Sharing this captured knowledge will make the organization more competitive in the future. Ken Derr, CEO of Chevron, sums this up well by saying, "Every day that a better idea goes unused is a lost opportunity. We have to share more, and we have to share faster. I tell employees that sharing and using best practices is the single most important thing they can do" (O’Dell & Grayson, p.11). To be able to do this means more than buying an off-the-shelf software solution. This research shows it requires an understanding of the barriers that can block a sharing program, in depth planning needed and a balance must be struck between the four enablers to accomplish the firm’s selected value proposition. Applying these concepts to the company’s plan will create a long-lasting and more effective knowledge management program. Bibliography (1) Angell, I. (1998, July/August). The Knowledge Scam. Information Strategy, 3, 23-24. (2) Borghoff, U. & Pareschi, R. (Eds.). (1998). Information Technology for Knowledge Management. Heidelberg, Germany: Springer. (3) Bottomley, A. (1998, July/August). Jumping on the Bandwagon. Information Strategy, 3, 25-26. (4) Caggiano, C. (1998, January). How’re You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down On the Firm? Inc. Online, 1-9. Retrieved February 11, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://www.inc.com/incmagazine/archives/01980701.html (5) Davenport, T., De Long, D. & Beers, M. (1998, Winter). Successful Knowledge Management Projects. Sloan Management Review (39), 1-2. Retrieved February 9, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://mitsloan.mit.edu/smr/past/1998/smr3924.html (6) Davenport, T. & Prusak, L. (1997). Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School. (7) Davenport, T. & Prusak, L. (1998). Know What You Know. Retrieved February 17, 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://www.brint.com/km/davenport/cio/know.htm (8) Davenport, T. (1998, February 1). Some Principles of Knowledge Management. Retrieved February 11. 1999 from the World Wide Web: http://kman.bus.utexas.edu/kman/kmprin.htm#sharing

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