A Concept, a Fad, a Process...
Moves Slowly Through Government By John Makulowich There is a lot less happening in the government with knowledge management than in the private sector if you use
Moves Slowly Through GovernmentThere is a lot less happening in the government with knowledge management than in the private sector if you use a June 22-24 conference in Boston as your main measuring stick. Jump ahead to the future and a program announcement from the American Productivity & Quality Center in Houston, and you get a similar impression. Its "Knowledge Symposium III: Lessons from the Leading Edge," set for Oct. 22-23 in Williamsburg, Va., includes only one session mentioning the government.
"You need creative approaches. From my vantage point, there are two parts to the solution: a technology component, which is about 20 percent, and a people part, which is about 80 percent," says Hanley. She feels the company is at the point where they have some answers in developing communities of practice and furthering KM. One answer is the need to build an identity for the community. "In addition to building the group, you need to have recognition, a need to reward, to motivate, to celebrate the successes. And the knowledge of the group needs to be current, real and relevant. It must always be evaluated for currency," says Hanley. AMS has 200 corporatewide databases for sharing knowledge and 1,800 databases within the business units. Even with all this content, it is important for people to meet. In fact, Hanley notes that database use goes up after people have met. AMS encourages meetings among its business units with an annual sharing conference.
A Concept, a Fad, a Process...So what's this knowledge management thing all about, anyway? Reading a potpourri of handouts and listening to a coterie of gurus during the June 22-24 conference in Boston can leave you shaking your head, if not nodding off. Nearly every speaker offered a different definition of knowledge. No wonder some attendees were confused. The presumed experts have yet to define the data set.
KMPG Consulting, Annapolis, Md., in a widely distributed 12-page document, "The Power of Knowledge: A Business Guide to Knowledge Management," states: "By knowledge, we mean experience, facts, rules, assertions and concepts about those subject areas that are crucial to the business (e.g., customers, markets, processes, regulations)." Another reason for the perplexity surrounding knowledge management is the range of issues, concepts and processes it supposedly covers. Then there is the real difficulty of defining exactly what counts as knowledge in a business setting, much less any other setting. Last, yet most important: just when you feel you are getting a sense of knowledge management, a speaker wipes away all that's gone before and introduces the idea of social capital. A lot of this smacks of alchemy. Some of it can be summed up in the words of several presenters pointing to the same phenomenon: old wine in new bottles. One speaker commented about a few magazines that have recast their names to include the knowledge management moniker but have kept the same editorial angle. Another speaker noted that a client, after being introduced to knowledge management, referred to his scanner as a "knowledge input device." Tom Stewart, a columnist for Fortune magazine who kicked off the conference, said that most knowledge management really deals with intellectual working capital, the information age equivalent of inventory. Asked about the relevance of this concept to the government, Stewart said among the problems government agencies face are identifying the customer and determining the right measurements. "There are other issues," said Stewart. "Fund accounting is a poor way to measure, only designed to apportion blame. The compartments the government is divided into make sharing difficult. There are structural problems. However, if the business model can be applied to consultants, it can be applied to the government." Stewart, who started popularizing the term "intellectual capital" in 1991, noted that an Internet search he conducted in 1995 on the phrase intellectual capital yielded 20 hits. A more recent effort resulted in 8,373 hits, including Rome as an intellectual capital. The term was first used in 1958. Intellectual capital's role in knowledge management reflects the change in the sources of differentiation in business, according to Stewart. With the digital revolution and the information age, intangible capital takes on a new importance. Assets such as knowledge, people, systems and customers gain new valuation. Carla O'Dell, president and chief operating officer of the American Productivity & Quality Center, the organization that created the criteria for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, spoke on the subject, "The Ten Enduring Truths in Knowledge Management." After her talk, she said the question government must address is, "Who is the customer?" "Is it the public at large, or Congress, or the executives in the agency? This goes to the heart of the value proposition. Most agencies have different customers," she said in an interview. "The question that must be asked is, what knowledge, if managed more efficiently, would make a difference in the organization? For example, what would lead to more government at less cost, that is, more customer service at less cost? Of course, it depends on the agency, whether it be IRS or the Commerce Department," said O'Dell. She admits that for government to alter its way of doing business, there must be a driving force and a reason to change. Those might be customer satisfaction and retention, related to citizens or congressional representatives. Asked about the bottom line, notoriously invisible in the government, O'Dell said everyone has one, they just may not know it. "Agencies need to re-educate Congress on the measures that matter. They need to control the agenda. They need to guide Congress in how to measure the specific agency," she said. One area to focus is education, where there are success stories and numerous best practices. Agencies, O'Dell suggested, could support those best practices and offer grants on what has worked. It was left to Larry Prusak, best-selling co-author of "Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know" (HBS Press, 1998) and a managing principal of the IBM Consulting Group in Boston, to set the conference on its collective head by questioning all that went before him. His talk, "Enablers and Enemies of Knowledge Management," introduced the notion of social capital, which to Prusak is the critical element in knowledge management and the subject of a book he is writing. Among the five enablers of knowledge management that he recited - that is, those elements of the 60 successful knowledge management projects (out of 120) he has observed or worked on - the first was an emphasis on social capital. He defined this as factors that lower transaction costs and enable communication. The three elements of social capital are space, trust and perceived equity. For example, Prusak talked about cognitive space, cyberspace and physical space, noting that people need a physical space like a library in which to meditate, share knowledge and get away from the clang and clutter of the office. The second enabler? Cheap wide-bandwidth technologies, like multimedia. The reason for this is people don't learn from numbers and documents, but from those devices that bring them as near as possible to the face-to-face relationship, he said. The third was a comfort with ambiguity and fuzziness. He told the audience the executive viewpoint that all problems have clear, crisp quantitative answers is wrongheaded, a result of nearly 75 percent of Global 1000 executives having engineering or accounting degrees. The fourth enabler of successful knowledge management projects was an implicit business strategy that acknowledges knowledge as a key factor of production. And the last enabler was the aligning of knowledge with individual rewards and recognition. What is the shelf life of knowledge management? Stewart said knowledge management had become a fad, and there would be no more conferences on the subject within five years. |
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