b.cognosco

KM

Some personal thoughts on Knowledge Management. [American Invisible, Inc.]

Hugh's RSS feed didn't include some key points from his story, so I've listed a few below:

A successful KM initiative needs:

• A compelling reason why each employee should buy in - rewards are called for
• training so that everyone appreciates the value of context. [...]
• training so that people learn to write for an audience outside their own group of contacts. [...]
• training so that people understand that most knowledge is specialized. [...]
• Someone VERY senior to champion the KM cause.

As Robert Buckman said in the interview John Robb posted yesterday, 90 percent of the effort put into the Knowledge Sharing system at Buckman Labs was spent encouraging people to share. And as I wrote in The Power of Knowledge Sharing, while some people will refuse to do this, most people simply don't know how.

The fact that the cost barriers for KM tools have plummeted means that those of us who already want to share can do so with less effort and less dollars. Now, how do we get those don't already want to, to join the group and be effective?