“1. The KM strategy is based on balancing people, process, and technology concerns.Each element needs enablers and capabilities to help critical knowledge move throughout your organization.

2. The KM strategy contributes to overall organizational goals. Focus on identifying and supporting knowledge flows around critical processes. Taking a more systematic [and systemic] approach to managing knowledge will contribute to bottom-line objectives. Balance instances of immediate impact and long-term needs.

3. Timing is everything. Your KM strategy should identify the sequencing of key activities and building capabilities that will help build the overall infrastructure and demonstrate organizational value sooner rather than later.

4. The KM strategy leverages common processes and technology. Value is gained from the application of KM across the enterprise, leveraging a common knowledge flow process enabled by standard IT tools. Support collaboration within and among business units and functions.

5. The strategy will transform the perception and value of KM. If your KM strategy is successful, then it will show results, avoid redundancy and duplication of effort (and investment), and enhance competiveness.”

To check out The New Edge in Knowledge, please click here.

I also urge you to check out O’Dell’s earlier book, If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice, co-authored with C. Jackson Grayson.  To do so, please click here.

Finally, I urge you to check out the abundance of resources and services available at the the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC).

O’Dell has served as its president since 1995; Hubert serves as Executive Director, Delivery Services.

 

 

 

Friday, April 8, 2011 Posted by Bob Morris | Bob’s blog entries | C. Jackson Grayson, Carla O’Dell, Cindy Hubert, Five Basic Tenets of Knowledge Management, If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice, The KM strategy contributes to overall organizational goals, The KM strategy is based on balancing people [comma] process [comma] and technology concerns, The KM strategy leverages common processes and technology, The New Edge in Knowledge: How Knowledge Management Is Changing the Way We Do Business, The strategy will transform the perception and value of KM, Timing is everything | Leave a Comment | Edit

Why questions are the new answers

While reading Peter Sims’s new book, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, I came upon this paragraph:

“One of the best ways to identify creative insights and develop ideas is to throw out a theory and experience things first-hand. After all, fresh problems, ideas, needs and desires aren’t obvious; they’re hidden beneath the surface. We can’t even know what questions to ask until we reach beyond what is already known through a true process of discovery: carefully exploring, observing, and listening to uncover what is hidden from the naked eye from the bottom up. In doing so, we must go deep, we must go wide, and we must be focused.”

In the book, Sims discusses several creative thinkers who include Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, PIXAR’s Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, the architect Frank Gehry, and the comedian Chris Rock.  All of them demonstrate

• An insatiable curiosity
• A compulsion to identify and then ask the right questions
• What Roger Martin characterizes as “integrative thinking”
• “Immersion in unfamiliar terrain”
• Constant experimentation
• Delight in “play”
• A compulsion to define with exquisite precision
• Flexibility when there is a need for reorientation
• Resilience during a major and unexpected crisis

Please click here to check out Little Bets, published by Free Press (2011).