Start : Online Magazin : Archiv : 2001 : Ausgabe August/September : Knowledge Asset Networking

Knowledge Asset Networking:
Strategy, Processes and Systems for Leveraging Corporate Knowledge

By Gregoris N. Mentzas

Table of Contents:

• Motivation for a Knowledge Asset-Centric Approach in KM
• Knowledge as a "Product"
• Knowledge as a "Process"
• The Knowledge-Asset Centric View
• The Knowledge-Asset Centric Framework
• The Know-Net Method
• The Case Studies

Motivation for a Knowledge Asset-Centric Approach in KM

The first phase in the emergence of knowledge management (KM) in the private sector is now drawing to an end [1]. This phase has been characterised by considerable hype and confusion.

In this first phase early adopters followed different approaches to knowledge management with varying emphasis on technology, cultural, organisational and managerial issues.

Nevertheless, if one has a look into the research landscape as well as into the business world, it is easy to notice that two main strategies for knowledge management have been employed by early adopters of the principle [2]. Let’s call them the "product" and the "process" approaches.

Knowledge as a "Product"

The "product" approach implies that knowledge is a thing that can be located and manipulated as an independent object. Proponents of this approach claim that it is possible to capture, distribute, measure and manage knowledge. This approach mainly focuses on products and artefacts containing and representing knowledge; usually, this means managing documents, their creation, storage, and reuse in computer-based corporate memories. Examples include: best-practice databases and lessons-learned archives, case-bases which preserve older business-case experiences, knowledge taxonomies and formal knowledge structures, etc.

This approach is also referred to as "content-centred" or "codification’ approach".

Adopting the "knowledge as a product" approach means treating knowledge as an entity rather separate from the people who create and use it. The typical goal is to take documents with explicit knowledge embedded in them – memos, reports, presentations, articles, etc. – and store them in a repository where they can be easily retrieved.

Examples of companies that aim at a continual enhancement of their knowledge base – the collection of best practices, methods and reusable work products – include General Motors, Glaxo Wellcome and DaimlerChrysler.

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Knowledge as a "Process"

The "process" approach puts emphasis on ways to promote, motivate, encourage, nurture or guide the process of knowing, and abolishes the idea of trying to capture and distribute knowledge. This view mainly understands KM as a social communication process, which can be improved by collaboration and cooperation support tools. In this approach, knowledge is closely tied to the person who developed it and is shared mainly through person-to-person contacts. The main purpose of Information Technology (IT) in this case is to help people communicate knowledge, not store it. IT tools in this case comprise e.g. e-mail, video-conferencing, workflow management systems, systems for the distributed authoring of hypertext documents, group-decision support systems.

This approach has also been referred to as the "collaboration" or "personalisation" approach.

Treating "knowledge as a process" usually considers enabling the development and flourishing of communities as a key solution for knowledge leverage.

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The Knowledge-Asset Centric View

Although much of the intangible knowledge points to the adoption of the "knowledge as a process" approach, some crucial knowledge leveraging elements (like best practices) still need a "knowledge as a product" view. So there is a real need for a balanced fusion of the two KM views. It should be stressed that this need has been identified by research firms like Gartner Group (e.g. see their 2000 report on the KM market).

The motivation of this paper is to present Know-Net, an innovative framework and method for KM that explicitly provides for such a fusion.

In developing the conceptual, methodological and technical architecture that fuses the two approaches we are building on the resource-based view of the firm [3] as it has been expanded to treat knowledge as a strategic asset [4].

We claim that both the process and the product based approaches aim to support the identification, managing and leveraging of knowledge, through better managing of the organisation’s knowledge assets. Knowledge assets are the resources that organisations wish to cultivate.

Knowledge assets can be human, such as a person or a network of people, structural, such as business process, or market, such as a brand name of a product. Naturally the product approach is more concerned with accessing and organising knowledge assets while the process approach makes direct connections between the organisational knowledge assets – both explicit and tacit. Both approaches however are using some form of knowledge representation as a means of packaging and transferring knowledge either from a person to a system and vice versa or between people.

We define as "knowledge objects" the means of representing knowledge assets, then the following statement outlines the relation between knowledge assets and knowledge objects:

For example: a person is a knowledge asset that can create new ideas, learnings, proposals, (k. objects); a community of interest is a knowledge asset that can create new ideas, best practices (k. objects); a process is a knowledge asset that can create and/or store and disseminate best practices, company standards, R&D material (k. objects).

A knowledge object represents the information required to be processed by humans and transformed in to knowledge. Knowledge derives from information through knowledge-creating activities that take place within and between humans. Typical knowledge-creating activities include (Davenport and Prusak, 1998):

• Comparison:
  how does information about this situation compares to other situations known?
• Consequences:
  what implications does the information have for decision and actions?
• Connections:
  how does this bit of knowledge relate to others?
• Conversation:
  what do other people think about this information?

The knowledge objects aim to facilitate and leverage such knowledge-creating activities by providing to humans the information needed.

A knowledge object has the following characteristics:

• It acts as a catalyst, enabling the fusion of knowledge flows between people, with knowledge content discovery and retrieval, through technology. That is to say, a knowledge object acts, amongst other things, as the primary connecting node for all key components in a KM system (strategy, people, process, content, technology) – "the KM glue".
• It facilitates the knowledge transfer from person to person, or from information to person.
• A knowledge object is created and maintained by a KM process.
• A knowledge object is used to search, organise and disseminate knowledge content.

Therefore, we conclude that the knowledge object is the common unifier and lowest common denominator of a holistic KM solution incorporating and integrating process and content, and we have used it as the "resultant manifestation" in the design of the Know-Net solution that fuses the process centric approach with the product centric approach; see also Figure 1:

Figure 1: Fusion of the "process" and "product" centric approaches

The consideration of the knowledge object being the common unifier for integrating the process and product approaches, not only underpins all three of the constituents of the Know-Net approach (framework, method, tool), but also links them together into one holistic solution, as described in detail in the following sections.

Figure 2 highlights the overall interdependencies of the Know-Net framework, method and tools:

Figure 2: Interdependences of the Know-Net framework, method and tool

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The Knowledge-Asset Centric Framework

Figure 3 depicts graphically the important and central role of knowledge assets in our approach. In the centre of our framework are the knowledge assets. As defined previously knowledge assets create/use/disseminate knowledge objects that are the representations of knowledge (both explicit and tacit).

The Know-Net framework also represents:

• the knowledge strategy, processes, structure and systems a company develops in order to facilitate knowledge creation and leveraging among and between, and
• the knowledge interaction networks at the individual, team, organisational and inter-organisational levels

In fact even these elements that are drawn in the periphery of the knowledge assets (structure, systems, processes, strategy) can be considered as knowledge assets themselves.

Figure 3: The Know-Net Framework

A process for example can be a knowledge asset if for instance it creates best practices, company standards, R&D material, etc. Having them as discrete entities linked to the knowledge assets aim primarily to indicate that they are or should be the constituents of the Knowledge Management Infrastructure (KMI) which should be established within a company, in order to facilitate knowledge leveraging initiatives.

The different levels of knowledge networking, represented in the outer section of the framework correspond to what Nonaka calls the "ontological dimension" in his model of organisations as knowledge creating mechanisms (see Nonaka, 1994). This ontological dimension refers to the social interactions, which begin at the individual level and then by communication between organisational boundaries let knowledge expand and grow-up.

According to Nonaka (see Nonaka and Ray, 1993) if new knowledge is relevant to the needs of the organisation, it is likely to permeate through groups and divisions and thereby extend the community of interaction dealing with that knowledge. New knowledge that has a potential to support more advantageous ways of doing things is likely to be retained as a subject for further debate within the network and may also lead to an extension of the community of interaction.

Within Know-Net we distinguish between four levels of knowledge networking – Individual, Team, Organisation, and Inter-Organisation:

• The individual level refers to the capabilities, experience, competencies and personal development issues treated at the individual level of the knowledge worker.
• The team and organisational levels include the internal company networks, i.e. the informal, self-organising, or the formal networks of communities of knowers with common interests, the communities of practice involved in similar activities, the engagement teams, etc. that are built within an organisation.
• The level of inter-organisational networks refers to inter-enterprise relationships, value networks where each focuses on core competencies, as well as on the accessibility to external, developed capabilities. Hence networks with customers, competitors, subcontractors, partners etc. are included in this level.

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The Know-Net Method

A basic tenet of knowledge management is that it is not primarily a technical issue. Knowledge management addresses basic cultural and organisational issues of how knowledge is shared, distributed and created, and how these processes relate to key business goals. This emphasis on the business as well as human element of knowledge management implies that for a KM initiative to be successful significant education, communication and consulting is required in parallel to technology implementations.

To support these activities, we have developed a methodology with the following distinguishing characteristics:

• It exploits the theoretical approach of integrating the process and product views using the Knowledge Assets and Objects as the unifying elements.
• It is complete because it covers the design, development, implementation and measurement of the initiative, and holistic in the sense that it addresses all components of knowledge management (strategy, people, processes, and technology).

The Know-Net method proposes the below-mentioned phased approach (see also Figure 4) to enable structured thinking and planning for a knowledge management project:

• Awareness about the benefits of knowledge management and its relationships to strategic as well as operational and day-to-day issues in the corporate environment.
• Stage I (Plan) refers to the Knowledge Management Strategic Planning phase.
• Stage II (Develop) is the phase in which an organisation transforms itself to a knowledge intensive company based on the company-specific KM value proposition derived in Stage I.
• Stage III (Operate) is the phase in which an organisation rolls-out a company-wide implementation plan with a holistic approach to KM.
• Measurement of the level of leveraging of knowledge assets with a KM effort.
• Training of both the knowledge workers to the new processes and technologies as well as of the staff to take up new knowledge-related roles (e.g. CKOs, knowledge analysts).

Figure 4: Building blocks of the Know-Net method

The method is designed to be modular so that an organisation can choose to start at different levels depending on its readiness, needs and requirements.

In Stage I of "Strategic Planning for Knowledge Management" an organisation determines:

• the vision and readiness for a knowledge management initiative, and
• the scope and feasibility of the project

In Stage II of "Developing the Knowledge Organisation" the structure and the design of a holistic solution (that covers processes, people and technology) are iteratively developed, tested and reviewed.

Stage III is the company-wide implementation of the KM initiative, while the Measurement part of the method aims to provide consistent support for measuring the creation, sharing and use of knowledge assets within the company.

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The Case-Studies

The Know-Net framework and method comprise an innovative approach for leveraging corporate knowledge that is built around a knowledge asset-centric approach – which offers a unique fusion of the knowledge-as-a-product (content) and knowledge-as-a-process (context) perspectives to knowledge management.

The Know-Net approach has been or is currently applied in the following organisations:

• the management consultancy company PLANET (now PLANET Ernst & Young)
• the global bank UBS [5]
• the chartered surveyors firm NAI Gooch Webster [6]
• the IT services company SINGULAR
• the software development company MDA
• the training and software customisation company DEBUS, and
• the CRM applications development company ALPHANOVA

The framework and method have helped these companies in:

• the development of knowledge-oriented strategic directions
• the knowledge analysis of existing situation
• the identification and leveraging of knowledge assets
• the development of a KM business case
• leveraging knowledge to radically improve the development of competencies at three levels
• individual level, consulting engagement level and organisation-wide level)
• leveraging of subject matter knowledge within people networks
• the development of knowledge asset schemata
• the integration of all the above in a consistent KM architecture, and
• the development of metrics and the continuous measurement of knowledge-asset related indices within the companies

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Bibliographical References

[1] Ovum (1999) Knowledge Management: Building the Collaborative Enterprise.

[2] Hansen, M.T./Nohria, N./Tierney, T. (1999) „What’s Your Strategy for Managing Knowledge?", Harvard Business Review, 1999, March-April, p.107-116.

[3] Wernerfelt, B. (1984) A Resource-based View of the Firm, Strategic Management Journal, 1984, September-October.

[4] Grant, R.M. (1997) The Knowledge-based View of the Firm: Implications for Management Practice, Long Range Planning, Vol. 30, No. 3, p. 450-454.

[5] Sonnenberger, G. (1999) „Knowledge Management: Some Experiences in a Real Bank Project", paper presented at the "Information Systems at the Turn of the Century", Swiss Computer Science Conference SCSC/99, October 6-7, 1999, Lausanne, Switzerland.

[6] Manders, C./Topintzi, E. (2000) „NAI Gooch Webster, Icebergs, Pubs and The Wheel World", Knowledge Management, Vol. 3, No. 5.