Perspectives on Knowledge Management: Concepts, Imperatives & Community

1. Perspectives on Knowledge Management: Concepts, Imperatives & Community CITO 6th Annual Regional Summit Maurice McNaughton Director, Center of Excellence Mona School of Business, UWI

2. What is Knowledge? Principle, moral values (Why) My father would say, “Son when I was your age…” Wisdom Strategy, practice, method, insight (How) Knowledge: Information combined with the experience, skills, values and insights of the human user to create value for the corporation Men at age 43 typically go through a mid-life crisis Description What, who, when, where, How many Information: Data plus some contextual references or categorization which provides relevance, value or meaning to the organization or user of the information Age=43 yrs old Data: Structured or unstructured facts and values of parameters and measures 43

3. Knowledge in Organizations Knowledge Management • the process which involves the systematic leveraging and cultivation of vital knowledge assets to create value for the organization

4. The Knowledge Society To make knowledge work productive will be the great management task of this century just as to make manual work productive was the great management task of last century“ • Peter Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society Knowledge Worker • One who works primarily with Information or develops and uses knowledge in the workplace

5. Implications for the Workplace • Collapse of traditional boundaries of space & time for interactions with Customers, Suppliers, Employees • Fundamental shift between management & worker • Knowledge-workers own the means of production; • intellectual capital cannot be owned, only attracted and will go where it is wanted, treated well; • symbiotic relationship • Conversations are the way knowledge-workers discover what they know, share with colleagues, create relationships that define the organization, & ultimately create new knowledge. • Manager's job is to create an environment that allows knowledge workers to learn and share (from experiences, other workers, customers, suppliers, business partners)

6. Creativity vs Knowledge “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” • Albert Einstein

7. Enabling Technologies ICT tools used to support KM: • Channels (email, IM): create, distribute digital information (high use,low commonality) • Platforms (intranets, Corporate Websites, Portals) - centralized production, high commonality, low use Issues: • KM Systems not on radar • traditional technologies don't do a good job of capturing knowledge • most Knowledge work practices /output are transparent/invisible to most people in the organization

8. Successful KM Platforms • Google • 31 billion searches on Google every month • Who used to answer these questions before Google (B.G.)? • Wikipedia • Knowledge content creation and editing by ad hoc virtual teams • A marvel in technical and social engineering • A 2005 study showed that the accuracy and quality of information in wikipedia compared favorably with the online edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica • Open Source Domain

9. Enterprise 2.0: Learning from the Web • Searchable : keyword search appears more useful, intuitive than structured taxonomies and navigation tools • Linkages: informal way of rating value and importance of content • Authoring: democratize the Authoring/publishing process;viz • Blogs : individual authorship, cumulative content • Wikis : Group authorship, iterative content -> high quality, convergent content • Tags: emergent, user categorization/classification - folksonomy (non-herarchical & redundant) • Extensions: pattern-matching, suggestion algorithms • Signalling: Email notification / RSS Feeds (Really Simple Syndication)

10. Knowledge Communities • Anchored in Social Networking • Powerful, Complex knowledge resource fueled by common interests, collaborative creativity and shared thinking • Whole is greater than Sum of the parts • Can be employed to identify, create, represent, and/or distribute knowledge • Enabled by Web 2.0 functionality: Internet, Blogs & Wikis, IM, RSS Feeds, Mash-Ups • Example: Open Source Communities