Core questions for today’s presentations: Why are you doing KM? What’s the connection with research? What are you looking for?
We worked in three groups to identify practical problems and research questions in three groups: private sector, SMEs and governmental/non-profit organisations.
Problem list for private sector
- informal networks (e.g. communities) vs. hierarchy
- where KM is located in a company? Is there KM department? Who is responsible?
- how to show KM success to managers and employees (=individual benefits): measurement and making people believing in KM
- knowledge is power vs. sharing
- right implementation decision on a small scale
- range of competencies in KM team
- KM competencies that enable people to share knowledge
- long-term vision: how to show that initial investments lead to future benefits
- communicating across different perspectives, background, languages
- articulating knowledge – how to scale up elicitation and active sharing
- how KM reaches those who don not have access to a computer
- finding who knows what
- technologies are not designed for people
Next to it we had extended discussions about connecting KM research and practice. I’ve got a feeling that we deal with typical KM problem: there are two groups of people with different goals, languages and mindsets, and knowledge is not openly flows between them. This discussion has triggered more thinking, but so far it’s too implicit to write about :)
I also thought about a couple of emerging research directions. One would be to look at motivation and embedding KM activities into everyday work. Next is KM introduction in a company: getting people involved, decision-making and power games. KM across heterogeneous groups is another: how to overcome barriers for knowledge flows between different contexts.
Tags: embedding, KMSS, research and practiceArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2002/09/05.html#a217; comments are here.
Related posts